Smart Tool Wear Monitoring of CFRP/CFRP Stack Drilling Using Autoencoders and Memory-Based Neural Networks

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The drilling of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) materials is a key process in the aerospace industry, where ensuring high product quality is a critical issue. Low-quality of final products may be caused by the occurrence of drilling-induced defects such as delamination, which can be highly affected by the tool conditions. The abrasive carbon fibers generally produce very fast tool wear with negative effects on the hole quality. This suggests the need to develop a method able to accurately monitor the tool wear development during the drilling process in order to set up optimal tool management strategies. Nowadays, different types of sensors can be employed to acquire relevant signals associated with process variables which are useful to monitor tool wear during drilling. Moreover, the increasing computational capacity of modern computers allows the successful development of procedures based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques for signal processing and decision making aimed at online tool condition monitoring. In this work, an advanced tool condition monitoring method based on the employment of autoencoders and gated recurrent unit (GRU) recurrent neural networks (RNN) is developed and implemented to estimate tool wear in the drilling of CFRP/CFRP stacks. This method exploits the automatic feature extraction capability of autoencoders to obtain relevant features from the sensor signals acquired by a multiple sensor system during the drilling process and the memory abilities of GRU to estimate tool wear based on the extracted sensor signal features. The results obtained with the proposed method are compared with other neural network approaches, such as traditional feedforward neural networks, and considerations are made on the influence that memory-based hyperparameters have on tool wear estimation performance.