A novel online tool condition monitoring method for milling titanium alloy with consideration of tool wear law

Abstract

Due to issues such as limited variability in monitoring data across different tool wear conditions and interference during the machining process, data-driven monitoring models are susceptible to misclassification. Therefore, this paper proposes a pioneering approach that takes into account the tool wear law and the characteristic distribution of tool wear monitoring data. Specifically, the paper proposes an automatic feature extraction and tool condition monitoring method based on Siamese Long Short-term Memory Networks (SLSTMs) to transform the original data distribution, enhance the differentiation of different tool wear condition monitoring data, and achieve accurate prediction of tool wear condition. Additionally, a hybrid data and mechanism-driven tool wear monitoring method is proposed that takes advantage of the fact that tool wear is continuous and irreversible to enable reliable adjustment of the monitoring results of the data-driven model without human intervention. The study conducted milling experiments on a three-axis vertical machining center, using TA2 titanium alloy as the workpiece material. Vibration signals from the spindle in three directions were collected as input to the network, with tool wear state labeled as “0″ or ”1″ as the output. Classical machine learning algorithms such as Decision Trees, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM), as well as classical deep learning algorithms such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Sparse Stacked Autoencoders (SSAE) and Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks (LSTM), were used to construct and compare feature extraction and state monitoring models. The proposed model based on Siamese Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks (SLSTMs) achieved testing average accuracy of 98.2% (σ2 = 0.44), outperforming typical deep learning algorithms such as CNN, LSTM and SSAE as well as traditional machine learning algorithms such as Decision Trees, KNN and SVM in terms of accuracy and robustness. Moreover, the proposed data and mechanism hybrid-driven tool wear monitoring method can effectively improve the monitoring accuracy and robustness of data-driven models such as CNN and SSAE. The monitoring accuracy of CNN and SSAE increased from 95.9% to 97.6% and 91.0% to 94.3%, respectively.