Tool wear monitoring in turning using fused data sets of calibrated acoustic emission and vibration

Abstract

The main aim of this research is to develop an on-line tool wear condition monitoring intelligent system for single-point turning operations. This is to provide accurate and reliable information on the different states of tool wear. Calibrated acoustic emission and vibration techniques were implemented to monitor the progress of wear on carbide tool tips. Previous research has shown that acoustic emission (AE) is sensitive to tool wear. However, AE, as a monitoring technique, is still not widely adopted by industry. This is because it is as yet impossible to achieve repeatable measurements of AE. The variability is due to inconsistent coupling of the sensor with structures and the fact that the tool structure may have different geometry and material property. Calibration is therefore required so that the extent of variability becomes quantifiable, and hence accounted for or removed altogether. Proper calibration needs a well-defined and repeatable AE source. In this research, various artificial sources were reviewed in order to assess their suitability as an AE calibration source for the single-point machining process. Two artificial sources were selected for studying in detail. These are an air jet and a pulsed laser; the former produces continuous-type AE and the latter burst type AE. Since the air jet source has a power spectrum resembling closely the AE produced from single-point machining and since it is readily available in a machine shop, not to mention its relative safety compared to laser, an air-jet source is a more appealing choice. The calibration procedure involves setting up an air jet at a fixed stand-off distance from the top rake of the tool tip, applying in sequence a set of increasing pressures and measuring the corresponding AE. It was found that the root-mean-square value of the AE obtained is linearly proportional to the pressure applied. Thus, irrespective of the layout of the sensor and AE source in a tool structure, AE can be expressed in terms of the common currency of 'pressure' using the calibration curve produced for that particular layout. Tool wear stages can then be defined in terms of the 'pressure' levels. In order to improve the robustness of the monitoring system, in addition to AE, vibration information is also used. In this case, the acceleration at the tool tip in the tangential and feed directions is measured. The coherence function between these two signals is then computed. The coherence is a function of the vibration frequency and has a value ranging from 0 to 1, corresponding to no correlation and full correlation respectively between the two acceleration signals. The coherence function method is an attempt to provide a solution, which is relatively insensitive to the dynamics and the process variables except tool wear. Three features were identified to be sensitive to tool wear and they are; AErms, and the coherence function of the acceleration at natural frequency (2.5-5.5 kHz) of the tool holder and at high frequency end (18-25kHz) respectively. A belief network, based on Bayes' rule, was created providing fusion of data from AE and vibration for tool wear classification. The conditional probabilities required for the belief network to operate were established from examples. These examples were presented to the belief network as a file of cases. The file contains the three features mentioned earlier, together with cutting conditions and the tool wear states. Half of the data in this file was used for training while the other half was used for testing the network. The performance of the network gave an overall classification error rate of 1.6 % with the WD acoustic emission sensor and an error rate of 4.9 % with the R30 acoustic emission sensor.