Tool Wear Monitoring with Vibration Signals Based on Short-Time Fourier Transform and Deep Convolutional Neural Network in Milling

Tool wear monitoring is essential in precision manufacturing to improve surface quality, increase machining efficiency, and reduce manufacturing cost. Although tool wear can be reflected by measurable signals in automatic machining operations, with the increase of collected data, features are manually extracted and optimized, which lowers monitoring efficiency and increases prediction error. For addressing the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a tool wear monitoring method using vibration signal based on short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) in milling operations. First, the image representation of acquired vibration signals is obtained based on STFT, and then the DCNN model is designed to establish the relationship between obtained time-frequency maps and tool wear, which performs adaptive feature extraction and automatic tool wear prediction. Moreover, this method is demonstrated by employing three tool wear experimental datasets collected from three-flute ball nose tungsten carbide cutter of a high-speed CNC machine under dry milling. Finally, the experimental results prove that the proposed method is more accurate and relatively reliable than other compared methods.