Tool condition monitoring method by anomaly segmentation of time-frequency images using acoustic emission in small hole drilling

Tool wear leads to a reduction in dimensional accuracy and surface quality, as well as unexpected sudden tool failure. A broken tool can cause irreparable damage to an expensive workpiece, resulting in increased operating costs and production delays. Since the mechanical strength of small-diameter drills is inadequate for the load and prone to breakage, tool condition monitoring and diagnosis is important to prevent sudden tool breakage, increase productivity, and promote automation in machining process. The present work is aimed to investigate a tool condition monitoring method based on the analysis of acoustic emission (AE) signals emitted during small-hole drilling. We propose DDM (Deep feature Distribution Modeling), a method for image-level anomaly detection and anomaly segmentation in time-series signal analysis. The peck drilling experiments on SKD61 steels were performed with high-speed steel (HSS) drills. The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) was applied to generate time-frequency (TF) image of the AE signals during the drilling process. The TF images were quantified as anomaly scores using the DDM, which establishes normality by fitting a multivariate Gaussian (MVG) to pre-trained deep features. The anomaly detection capability of the DDM and the convolutional autoencoder (CAE) was compared using dummy data for validation. The digital microscope was employed to measure tool wear. Chip morphology was also observed by the laser microscopy. As the tool wear progressed, the anomaly score increased or decreased, with several sharp increases observed between holes 3805 and 3869 just prior to tool failure. An increase in the width of the shear layer spacing of the chips was also observed just prior to failure. Changes in the anomaly score associated with tool wear were more clearly identified by creating anomaly maps. The present investigation shows that waveform processing of AE signals using the CWT and anomaly detection based on the DDM are efficient methods for tool condition monitoring. Our proposed approach makes it possible to visualize the differences in anomaly states using a more subdivided layer context by generating multiple anomaly maps with deep feature vectors obtained from multiple layers.