A Multisensor Fusion Method for Tool Condition Monitoring in Milling

Tool fault diagnosis in numerical control (NC) machines plays a significant role in ensuring manufacturing quality. Tool condition monitoring (TCM) based on multisensors can provide more information related to tool condition, but it can also increase the risk that effective information is overwhelmed by redundant information. Thus, the method of obtaining the most effective feature information from multisensor signals is currently a hot topic. However, most of the current feature selection methods take into account the correlation between the feature parameters and the tool state and do not analyze the influence of feature parameters on prediction accuracy. In this paper, a multisensor global feature extraction method for TCM in the milling process is researched. Several statistical parameters in the time, frequency, and time-frequency (Wavelet packet transform) domains of multiple sensors are selected as an alternative parameter set. The monitoring model is executed by a Kernel-based extreme learning Machine (KELM), and a modified genetic algorithm (GA) is applied in order to search the optimal parameter combinations in a two-objective optimization model to achieve the highest prediction precision. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the Pearson's correlation coefficient (PCC) based, minimal redundancy and maximal relevance (mRMR) based, and Principal component analysis (PCA)-based feature selection methods.