The design procedure and construction of a 3-axis strain gage typed force sensor for milling application is presented in this thesis. There are 3 stages of sensor process that must be taken into account: detecting stage, signal conditioning stage and terminating readout stage. The deflective structure of this sensor, which subjected to bending moment, is the main consideration in the first stage, by using the finite element method for analyzing. The objective of the finite element analysis is to evaluate the structure deformation, and natural frequencies which will be used as the criteria for optimizing the structure of the sensor. The second stage is implemented by applying HP 3852A data acquisition and control unit to collect strain data in form of voltage from half bridge circuit via the high speed voltmeter and dynamic strain gage FET multiplexer. The reading data is sent to the computer for signal processing. The HP VEE (Hewlett Packard's Visual Engineering Environment) is used as the processing tool,this include signal processing, display and data store and retrieval. Due to the lack of a suitable sensor test base, at this phase, the commercial force sensor, the Kistler dynamometer 9255B, is used as the comparison unit. The steady-state cutting condition by maintaining the constant feed-rate is used for the measurement. The objective of comparison is to observe the trend of the real cutting data recorded from both Kistler and the sensor developed in this research. From the experiment, both instruments behave similarly. Next phase, the sensor test based will be constructed for calibration to obtain more accurate reading data.
