Tool Wear Estimation in End Milling of Titanium Alloy Using NPE and a Novel WOA-SVM Model

Accurate identification of the tool wear states in machining of titanium alloys continues to be a thorny problem. Rapid construction of accurate and effective tool wear predictive models with regard to various titanium alloys is indispensable for promoting the development of intelligent manufacturing. This article presents a novel WOA-SVM model that integrates support vector machine (SVM) and whale optimization algorithm (WOA), which is utilized for accurate estimation of the tool wear in end milling of titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V under variable cutting conditions. The signal features in three domains are extracted from the original cutting forces and constitute the "complete features" that are adopted as the monitoring features. Besides, neighborhood preserving embedding (NPE) is utilized to fuse the monitoring features and realize dimension reduction, which aims at improving the modeling efficiency of the novel WOA-SVM model. The experimental results show that under the premise of guaranteeing prediction accuracy, the utilization of NPE reduces the modeling time-consumption of WOASVM by more than 90%. In comparison with the commonly used methods (such as PSO-SVM and GSA-SVM), WOA-SVM takes on comparable prediction accuracy and can reduce the modeling time-consumption by more than 30% in most cases. Moreover, the WOA-SVM model has better prediction accuracy and stability than other classical methods, such as k-nearest neighbor ( k-NN), feedforward neural network (FFNN), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), and classification and regression tree (CART). Therefore, the combination of NPE and WOA-SVM provides a guarantee for rapidly constructing accurate tool wear predictive models in machining of titanium alloys.