Data mining for quality control: Burr detection in the drilling process

Drilling process is one of the most important operations in aeronautic industry. It is performed on the wings of the aeroplanes and its main problem lies with the burr generation. At present moment, there is a visual inspection and manual burr elimination task subsequent to the drilling and previous to the riveting to ensure the quality of the product. These operations increase the cost and the resources required during the process. The article shows the use of data mining techniques to obtain a reliable model to detect the generation of burr during high speed drilling in dry conditions on aluminium Al 7075-T6. It makes possible to eliminate the unproductive operations in order to optimize the process and reduce economic cost. Furthermore, this model should be able to be implemented later in a monitoring system to detect automatically and on-line when the generated burr is out of tolerance limits or not. The article explains the whole process of data analysis from the data preparation to the evaluation and selection of the final model. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.