The investigation on the prediction of tool wear and the determination of optimum cutting conditions in machining 17-4PH stainless steel

The purpose of this paper is to develop a predictive model for the prediction of tool flank wear and an optimization model for the determination of optimum cutting conditions in machining 17-4PH stainless steel. The back-propagation neural network (BPN) was used to construct the predictive model. The genetic algorithm (GA) was used in the optimization model. The Taguchi method (TM) was used to find the optimum parameters for both models, respectively. Two steps of experiments have been carried out by machining 6 ,m length and 90 mm length of the workpiece, respectively. The experimental scheme was arranged by using an orthogonal array of TM. It has been shown that the predictive model is capable of predicting the tool flank wear in an agreement behavior. The optimization model has also been proved that it is a convenient and efficient method to find the optimum cutting conditions associated with the maximum metal removal rate (MMRR) under different constraints. The constraint is the tool flank wear that can be determined from the predictive model. Furthermore, the systematic procedure to develop the models in this paper can be applied to the usage of the predictive or optimized problems in metal cutting. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.