Welding wire is a major type of welding consumable, which needs to be winded onto spools for sale. Currently, the winding process is accomplished manually due to obstacles such as automatic spool loading and clamping. When loading the spool, the angular position of the spool is a prerequisite for matching the drive rod on the spindle and drive bore on the spool. Therefore, this paper proposes a template-matching method combined with area-based matching and feature-point detection to measure the angular position of the spool, and presents a mechanical system that can rotate the spool to match the drive rod and push the spool onto the spindle. A novel feature-point distribution density (FPDD) method was developed to accelerate the matching process and improve matching reliability by pre-locating the searching area. The robustness and accuracy of the template-matching-based measuring method were validated using a built prototype of the mechanical system. The comparison result shows that the proposed method was superior in robustness, accuracy, and speed, and it was efficient for automatic spool loading in the welding wire winding process.

Applying Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL) for machining processes such as drilling can obtain process performance improvement comparing with completely dry situations, and reduce the use of machining fluids considerably comparing with flood cooling. Although many researches have been reported on the comparison of temperature, tool wear, surface roughness and chip patterns between dry and MQL cutting, relatively fewer literatures about the cutting forces and their features can be found. In this paper, first dry and MQL drilling of cast iron, S45C, SUS304 and Ti alloy were conducted, and then life term of dry, air cooling and MQL drilling of SUS304 were carried out. TiCN coated HSS drill bits with double inner coolant holes were applied to produce air cooling and MQL internally. The thrust force and torque were monitored by a dynamometer and, time, frequency, and time-frequency domain features of them are extracted and compared. Especially there are some newly generated features derived from transforming the thrust force and torque to two orthogonal forces and further being analyzed in a rectangular coordinate. Experiment results show that, for different workpiece materials MQL affects different force features in different ways and for SUS304 tool life is greatly lengthened, friction is suppressed, chip jamming is alleviated and both the static and dynamic components of cutting forces reduce when air cooling and MQL are applied. Moreover, it is revealed that the differences of features between dry and other two conditions are quite obvious but those between air cooling and MQL are inconspicuous.

This paper discusses a method of converting thrust and torque detected during drilling, which transforms thrust and torque into equivalent thrust force and principal force. The static and dynamic components defined according to this method are used to evaluate instability. The effects of different conditions on the static and dynamic components are investigated through experiments.