On Controlling Milling Instability and Chatter at High Speed

Abstract

A highly interrupted machining process, milling at high speed can be dynamically unstable and chattering with aberrational tool vibrations. While its associated response is still bounded in the time domain, however, milling could become unstably broadband and chaotic in the frequency domain, inadvertently causing poor tolerance, substandard surface finish and tool damage. Instantaneous frequency along with marginal spectrum is employed to investigate the route-to-chaos process of a nonlinear, time-delayed milling model. It is shown that marginal spectra are the tool of choice over Fourier spectra in identifying milling stability boundary. A novel discrete-wavelet-based adaptive controller is explored to stabilize the nonlinear response of the milling tool in the time and frequency domains simultaneously. As a powerful feature, an adaptive controller along with an adaptive filter effective for on-line system identification is implemented in the wavelet domain. By exerting proper mitigation schemes to both the time and frequency responses, the controller is demonstrated to effectively deny milling chatter and restore milling stability as a limit cycle of extremely low tool vibrations.