Surface roughness identification in end milling using vibration signals and fuzzy clustering

The study presented involves the identification of surface roughness in Aluminum work pieces in an end milling process using fuzzy clustering of vibration signals. Vibration signals are experimentally acquired using an accelerometer for varying cutting conditions such as spindle speed, feed rate and depth of cut. Features are then extracted by processing the acquired signals in both the time and frequency domain. Techniques based on statistical parameters, Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) and the Continuous Wavelet Transforms (CWT) are utilized for feature extraction. The surface roughness of the machined surface is also measured. In this study, fuzzy clustering is used to partition the feature sets, followed by a correlation with the experimentally obtained surface roughness measurements. The fuzzifier and the number of clusters are varied and it is found that the partitions produced by fuzzy clustering in the vibration signal feature space are related to the partitions based on cutting conditions with surface roughness as the output parameter. The results based on limited simulations are encouraging and work is underway to develop a larger framework for online cutting condition monitoring system for end milling.