A Novel Local Time-Frequency Domain Feature Extraction Method for Tool Condition Monitoring Using S-Transform and Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

This paper investigates an online effective method for tool condition monitoring. Acoustic emission signal of a system which is acquired by a sensor mounted to the spindle of the milling machining center is used as the fault indicator because it is easily to be installed, inexpensive and practical for use in industrial environment. Time-frequency analysis is selected for signal processing step based on its ability to reveal time and frequency variant characteristics of faulty signal. S-transform is used as a powerful time-frequency method for this purpose. Because of the high dimension of the time-frequency results, it is desirable to use a local region of interest in time-frequency domain instead of using the entire information, for fast and accurate monitoring and detection when any abnormal/fault operating condition might occur. Such a strategy also helps to reduce the computation cost which is necessary for online applications and improves the interpretation resolution for law quality signals. An optimization method based on genetic algorithm is used for finding the most discriminative local area as the region of interest in time-frequency domain. For feature generation step, a correlation coefficient between each signal and the healthy signal is assigned to the signal using a 2-D correlation analysis. Curve fitting approach is then used to determine a function to approximate the fault value based on the correlation coefficients. Experimental results based on a milling machine under different operating conditions show that this method has a high accuracy for fault detection. It is also concluded that the accuracy of the local feature extraction is higher than the conventional ways.