Analysis of the material removing mechanism for an automated chiselling approach

Abstract

The European stone industry was exposed to great competition during the last years. However the
European market is still the most important one for natural stone products. Especially traditional
artistic processing techniques are very expensive due to the high personnel requirement. Thus
automation becomes interesting for economic reasons. To process individually designed stone
products it is planned to use a robot mounted tool.
One of the issues to achieve this goal is the analysis of the material removal to get repeatable
results. We analysed different manual techniques used for sandstone surfaces in a first step and
measured the movement of the chisel with a high speed camera system. We chose two techniques
for further analysis and designed a first mechanical testbed to achieve repeatable kinetic energies.
The material removal was analysed with the camera. Thus we are able to see the movement of the
chisel and the flow of the removed material.
With this knowledge the analysis of relevant material and process properties will be shown as well.
Furthermore, this paper discusses the relevant result parameters which define the optical quality of
the surface. Combining these data it is possible to analyse the working parameters of an
automated system which is able to process various sandstones with individual surface geometries.