Sensing Cutter Breakage in Milling

Abstract The paper describes a system for sensing milling cutter breakage. It is based on recognizing changes in the pattern of the cutting force. The regular periodic variation per tooth is filtered out by synchronized sampling, averaging per tooth and first differencing and the change due to the broken tooth stands out. The threshold for alarm is set with respect to the mean force per revolution (moving average) to make it independent of changes in radial and axial depths of cut and in chip load. Due to practical difficulties with force measurements the use of vibrational signal is explored and found feasible.