An intelligent sensor for monitoring milling cutter breakage

A new intelligent sensor system using neural networks to separate tool breakage clearly from the cutter run-out or cutting transients in milling is proposed. The features of the spindle displacement signal are fed into the input layer of the neural network. With the back propagation training algorithm, the output of the neural network can be used to identify the milling cutter with or without tool breakage. Experiments show that this new approach can monitor tool breakage in milling operations successfully.