A Feature Extraction Method for the Wear of Milling Tools Based on the Hilbert Marginal Spectrum

Abstract

The Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) can adaptively delineate complex non-linear, non-stationary signals when used as the Hilbert–Huang marginal spectrum through empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the Hilbert transform, to highlight local features of signals. Characterized by high resolution, the Hilbert marginal spectrum has been widely applied in mechanical signal processing and fault diagnosis. In the research, an HHT based on the improved EMD was proposed to analyze the cutting force, vibration acceleration (AC), and acoustic emission (AE) signals during tool wear in the milling process. At first, the collected signals were subjected to range analysis, which revealed that tool wear was closely related to the signals collected during the cutting process. Then, EMD was applied to the signals, followed by variance analysis after calculating the energies of each intrinsic mode function (IMF) component. Afterwards, the IMF components significantly influenced by wear degree, while slightly influenced by the three cutting factors (cutting velocity, feed per tooth, and cutting depth), were selected as IMF sensitive to the degree of wear. The HHT was finally applied to the sensitive IMF components of signals containing major tool wear information, thus obtaining the Hilbert marginal spectra of the signals, which were able to reflect the changes in signal amplitude with frequency. On the basis of the Hilbert marginal spectrum, the method defined the feature energy function which was then used as the eigenvector for predicting tool wear in milling processes. The analysis of signals in four tool wear states indicated that the method can extract salient tool wear features.