Agile monitoring system for turning of difflicult-to-cut materials

This paper presents an agile monitoring system based on multiple sensors and fuzzy pattern recognition for the detection of tool cutting conditions in turning operations. Three piezoelectric force sensors and a thermocouple (NiCr-Nial) sensor were used to measure cutting force and temperature without altering the machine tool dynamics. Fuzzy C-means algorithm is used to improve the agility of selecting, clustering and classifying cutting tool conditions.