Intelligent robust milling tool wear monitoring via fractal analysis of cutting force

The intelligent tool wear monitoring is of great importance to improve the milling precision and efficiency. In traditional intelligent tool wear monitoring methods, features used to indicate tool wear always vary with cutting conditions and hence not applicable in cutting condition-varying cases. In this paper, a cutting condition robust milling tool wear monitoring method is proposed. In the method, the irregularity of cutting force is measured by fractal dimension and then utilized to indicate the tool wear level. Experiments of tool wear monitoring are conducted for high speed CNC manufacturing. The simulation results show that the proposed fractal dimension of cutting force is capable to indicate tool wear level and robust to cutting conditions.