Towards a systematical approach for wear detection in sheet metal forming using machine learning

Wear is one of the decisive factors for the economic efficiency of sheet metal forming processes. Thereby, progressive wear phenome lead on the one hand to a poor workpiece quality and on the other hand to tool failure resulting in high machine downtimes. This trend is intensified by processing high-strength materials and the reduction of lubricant up to dry forming. In this context, data-driven monitoring methods such as machine learning (ML) provide the potential of detecting wear at an early stage to overcome manual and cost-intensive process inspections. The presented study aims to provide a ML based inline quantification of wear states within sheet metal forming processes. The development of this monitoring approach is based on a procedure model the Knowledge Discovery in Time series and image data in Engineering Epplications (KDT-EA) which is validated on two forming processes, blanking and roll forming, that strongly differ in their physical process behavior and their acquired process data. The presented inline quantification allows an estimation of wear states with a deviation of less than 0.83% for the blanking process and 2.21% for the roll forming process from the actual wear state. Furthermore, it is shown that combining different feature extraction methods as well as a compensation of unbalanced data using data augmentation techniques are able to improve the performance of the investigated ML models.