Tool wear monitoring and selection of optimum cutting conditions with progressive tool wear effect and input uncertainties

One of the big challenges in machining is replacing the cutting tool at the right time. Carrying on the process with a dull tool may degrade the product quality. However, it may be unnecessary to change the cutting tool if it is still capable of continuing the cutting operation. Both of these cases could increase the production cost. Therefore, an effective tool condition monitoring system may reduce production cost and increase productivity. This paper presents a neural network based sensor fusion model for a tool wear monitoring system in turning operations. A wavelet packet tree approach was used for the analysis of the acquired signals, namely cutting strains in tool holder and motor current, and the extraction of wear-sensitive features. Once a list of possible features had been extracted, the dimension of the input feature space was reduced using principal component analysis. Novel strategies, such as the robustness of the developed ANN models against uncertainty in the input data, and the integration of the monitoring information to an optimization system in order to utilize the progressive tool wear information for selecting the optimum cutting conditions, are proposed and validated in manual turning operations. The approach is simple and flexible enough for online implementation.