TOOL CONDITION MONITORING USING ACOUSTIC EMISSION, SURFACE ROUGHNESS AND GROWING CELL STRUCTURES NEURAL NETWORK

Abstract

The monitoring of tool wear is a most difficult task in the case of various metal-cutting processes. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) has been used to estimate or classify certain wear parameters, using continuous acquisition of signals from multi-sensor systems. Most of the research has been concentrated on the use of supervised neural network types like multi-layer perceptron (MLP), using back-propagation algorithm and Radial Basis Function (RBF) network. In this article, a new constructive learning algorithm proposed by Fritzke, namely Growing Cell Structures (GCS) has been used for tool wear estimation in face milling operations, thereby monitoring the condition of the tool. GCS generates compact network architecture in less training time and performs well on new untrained data. The performance of this network has been compared with that of another constructive learning algorithm-based neural network, namely the Resource Allocation Network (RAN). For the sake of establishing the effectiveness of GCS, results obtained have been compared with those obtained using Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP), which is a standard and widely used neural network.

Keywords:

• acoustic emission
• face milling
• growing cell structures
• Resource Allocation Network
• surface roughness
• tool condition monitoring