A B S T R A C T
The extension of the useful life of manufacturing equipment is one of the keys to sustainable
manufacturing. The high uptime requirements of the semiconductor industry result in the need for
conservative preventive maintenance schemes, which leads to replacement of key components before
the end of their useful life. This paper presents the results of research toward a more intelligent condition
based maintenance scheme for belt monitoring in a belt driven automated material handling system. An
experimental study of belt dynamics showed that transverse belt vibrations were sensitive to changes in
belt length, belt tension, belt misalignment, and excitation location. Based on these findings, a novel,
contact based device was designed to consistently excite belt vibrations in the material handling system
with greatly reduced variations in belt length and initial condition location. On average, standard
deviations of tension estimates using the device were 65% lower than that of a trained technician
performing the current standard technique on three different robots. This design was then further
adapted to facilitate a non-contact belt excitation and monitoring approach that did not require bringing
the material handling system offline in order to obtain sensor readings. Such a procedure greatly eased
and accelerated the monitoring process.