Face milling tool wear condition monitoring based on wavelet transform and Shannon entropy

Tool condition monitoring is an important issue in the advanced machining process. Existing methods of tool wear monitoring is hardly suitable for mass production of cutting parameters fluctuation. In this paper, a new method for milling tool wear condition monitoring base on tunable Q-factor wavelet transform and Shannon entropy is presented. Spindle motor current signals were recorded during the face milling process. The wavelet energy entropy of the current signals carries information about the change of energy distribution associated with different tool wear conditions. Experiment results showed that the new method could successfully extract significant signature from the spindle-motor current signals to effectively estimate tool wear condition during face milling.