Temperature Measurements for the Tool Wear and Hole Quality Assessment during Drilling of CFRP/CFRP Stacks

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) laminates are widely employed in the aerospace industry as they are lightweight materials with high mechanical strength. Drilling, that is the most common machining process for CFRP parts, may induce several types of defects in the laminates. This paper is aimed at the correlation of parameters representative of the hole quality and tool wear with data from thermographic analysis with the aim to investigate the possibility to assess the hole quality in real time, and to detect the need for tool replacement without physical measurements on the tool. The developed procedure is applied to the holes produced by two different geometry tools.