State Monitoring Method for Tool Wear in Aerospace Manufacturing Processes Based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)

In the aerospace manufacturing field, tool conditions are essential to ensure the production quality for aerospace parts and reduce processing failures. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to develop a suitable tool condition monitoring method. Thus, we propose a tool wear process state monitoring method for aerospace manufacturing processes based on convolutional neural networks to recognize intermediate abnormal states in multi-stage processes. There are two innovations and advantages of the proposed approach: one is that the criteria for judging abnormal conditions are extended, which is more useful for practical application. The other is that the proposed approach solved the influence of feature-to-recognition stability. Firstly, the tool wear level was divided into different state modes according to the probability density interval based on the kernel density estimation (KDE), and the corresponding state modes were connected to obtain the point-to-point control limit. Then, the state recognition model based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) was developed, and the sensitivity of the monitoring window was considered in the model. Finally, open-source datasets were used to verify the feasibility of the proposed method, and the results demonstrated the applicability of the proposed method in practice for tool condition monitoring.