An approach based on current and sound signals for in-process tool wear monitoring

This paper presents a tool condition monitoring system (TCMS) for on-line tool wear monitoring in turning. The proposed TCMS was developed taking into account the necessary trade-off between cost and performance to be applicable in practice, in addition to a high success rate. The monitoring signals were the feed motor current and the sound signal. The former was used to estimate the feed cutting force using the least squares version of support vector machines (LS-SVM). Singular spectrum analysis (SSA) was used to extract information correlated with tool wear from the sound signal. The estimated feed cutting force and the SSA decomposition of the sound signal alone with the cutting conditions constitute the input data to the TCMS. Again LS-SVM was used to estimate tool condition and its reliability for on-line implementation was validated by experiments using AISI 1040 steel. The results showed that the proposed TCMS is fast and reliable for tool condition monitoring.