Tool wear monitoring system for CNC end milling using a hybrid approach to cutting force regulation

A tool wear monitoring system is indispensable for better machining productivity, with the guarantee of machining safety by informing of the time due for changing a tool in automated and unmanned CNC machining. Different from monitoring methods using other signals, the monitoring of the spindle current has been used without requiring additional sensors on the machine tools. For reliable tool wear monitoring, only the current signal from tool wear should be extracted from the other parameters to avoid exhaustive analyses on signals in which all of the parameters are fused together. In this paper, the influences of force components from different parameters on the measured spindle current are investigated, and a hybrid approach to cutting force regulation is employed for tool wear signal extraction from the spindle current. Finally, wear levels are verified with experimental results by means of real-time feedrate aspects, varied to regulate the force component from tool wear.