Comparative analysis of surface roughness prediction using DOE and ANN techniques during endmilling of glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) composites

Purpose - This paper aims to study the comparison between a response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) in the modelling and prediction of surface roughness during endmilling of glass-fibre-reinforced polymer composites. Design/methodology/approach - Aiming to achieve this goal, several milling experiments were performed with polycrystalline diamond inserts at different machining parameters, namely, feed rate, cutting speed, depth of cut and fibre orientation angle. Mathematical model is created using central composite face-centred second-order in RSM and the adequacy of the model was verified using analysis of variance. ANN model is created using the back propagation algorithm. Findings - With regard to the machining test, it was observed that feed rate is the dominant parameter that affects the surface roughness, followed by the fibre orientation. The comparison results show that models provide accurate prediction of surface roughness in which ANN performs better than RSM. Originality/value - The data predicted from ANN are very nearer to experimental results compared to RSM; therefore, this ANN model can be used to determine the surface roughness for various fibre-reinforced polymer composites and also for various machining parameters.