An economic and reliable tool life estimation procedure for turning.

The conventional methods of tool life estimation take a long time and consume a lot of work piece material. In this paper, a quicker method for the estimation of tool life is proposed, which requires less consumption of work piece material and tools. In this method the tool life is estimated by fitting a best-fit line on the data falling in the steady wear zone and finding the time till tool failure by extrapolation. Neural networks are used to predict lower, upper and most likely estimates of the tool life. Comparison between neural networks and multiple regression shows the superiority of the former. The paper also proposes a methodology for continuous monitoring of tool use in the shop floor and updating/obtaining the tool life estimates based on the shop floor feed back. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]