Recognition of chatter in boring operations using spindle motor current

This paper proposes a novel chatter recognition method using spindle motor current in boring operations. The feasibility of spindle motor current is investigated based on the spindle control system. Spindle motor current is also compared with feed motor current both in time domain and in frequency domain. Digital filtering is used to improve the performance of spindle motor current for chatter recognition and some important features are extracted to examine its performance further. Experiment results show that spindle motor current is more sensitive to chatter than feed motor current when the inertia of the spindle-toolholder-tool (STT) system is small, and spindle motor current can be used to recognize chatter under different cutting conditions.