A Cutting Force Estimator for CNC Machining Centers

M. Dolen', B. Kaftanoglu' ( I ) , R. D. Lorenz' Middle East Technical University, Dept. of Mech. Engineering, Ankara, Turkey 'university of Wisconsin - Madison, Dept. of Mech. Engineering, Madison, USA
1

Abstract This study presents a cutting force estimator topology for feed drives of CNC vertical machining centers to compute the machining forces accurately. The estimator employs recursive discrete Fourier transform to not only estimate inertial forces on the system but also to filter effectively the noise components in the measurements. The accuracy of the estimator is compared to that of a Luenberger observer while the overall performance of the estimator is evaluated through an experimental study. The paper also discusses its inherent limitations. Keywords Machine, Estimating, Measurement

1 INTRODUCTION Cutting force sensors in CNC technology can potentially provide the most crucial information for adaptive control, tool-condition monitoring, and detection of chatter vibrations [ I ] . Although force sensors are currently available in the market for a wide variety of CNC machines, they have not gained recognition in industry due to their well-known drawbacks. Hence, the technological trend in the industry is towards the employment of estimation schemes as well as the elimination of sensors wherever these methods are feasible alternatives. To estimate the machining forces accurately, the CNC machine tool feed drives (FDs), which are directly subjected to the machining forces, must be thoroughly modeled. The research in this field is generally on the development of advanced digital control algorithms with the utilization of rather simple linear models of the controlled FD (Van Brussel and Vastmans [2] and Kulkarni et a/. [3]). Only a handful of studies concentrate on the estimation of machining forces by utilizing accurate physical FD models. For instance, Stein et a/. [4] has conducted a sensitivity analysis on the currents drawn by the FD motor of a CNC lathe. Their analysis reveals the feasibility of designing a disturbance force estimator that employs current measurements. Similarly, Altintas [5] developed a simple electromechanical FD model to estimate the cutting force components. Although the estimation results are in good agreement with the steadystate experimental data; the method, which does not include inertial forces, produces some deviations when estimating transient forces. Main motivation of this paper is to develop an accurate(and high-bandwidth) force estimator for CNC machine tools with the utilization of advanced FD physical models that includes the major nonlinearities of such systems. 2 FEED DRIVE MODELLING To estimate the disturbance on a FD system, one needs to develop the electromechanical model of a typical FD as shown in Fig. 1. The differential equations governing the motion for the FD table can be written as follows:

where Tfl, Tsl, and Teml are friction torque, load torque, and electromagnetic torque respectively.

Figure 1: Typical mechanical feed drive system. The motor side contains several preloaded ball bearings causing frictional losses. Employing the (empirical) bearing friction model [6] yields the motor friction torque: Tr1 = ( b r l ~ r+ l To11.w ~~
(0111

(3)

where bl and To1 are positive constants; while w1 refers to the speed of the motor. Utilizing all three equations yields the differential equation of the FD system:

where J 1 , is the equivalent inertia; hs is the pitch of feed screw [m] while qs refers to the efficiency of the screw. Assuming that the same type of screw and the motor are utilized in the Y-axis FD (a.k.a. "saddle"), one can derive a similar differential equation. Note that the friction force Ff (Ffl or Ff2) in (4) can be expressed as follows:

F r = ,u(v)FN

(5)

where FN is the equivalent normal force induced by the dynamic load on the table. For hydrodynamic guideways, the friction coefficient p takes the following form [7]:
+ c4v p(v) = sgn(v).(cl + c~e-c3v)

(6)

Here Fsl is the force applied by the nut to the table; Ffl is the friction force on the table. With respect to the motor side, one can write the following:

where table speed v = hsw/2x (vDO'); c1, ..., c4 are (positive) empiric friction coefficients. It is clear from (4) that the friction force (Ffl or Ff2) needs to be determined accurately to estimate these process forces. Dolen [8] presents a detailed friction (normal force) model for hydrodynamic guideways. The normal force is heavily affected by the magnitudes of cutting force components. Dolen [8] shows that the model boils down to a simple

Coulomb (dry) friction model for light machining conditions where the magnitudes of average machining forces are less than 1kN.
3 CUTTING FORCE ESTIMATION Disturbance force estimation has three components: i. acceleration estimation; ii. current filtering and/or electromagnetic torque estimation; iii. friction force estimation and decoupling. Fig. 2 illustrates the network design incorporating these important ingredients. The estimator essentially generates all basis functions in (4). That is, the viscous- and the Coulomb friction torque terms in (4) are directly calculated while a recursive discrete Fourier transform (RDFT) network, which is illustrated in Fig. 3, is used not only to filter out the switching noise in the armature current of the brush-type DC motor but also to calculate the inertial torque on the motor.

handful of RDFT units are required to perform the desired calculations. The disturbance force estimate of this topology initially includes the friction force on the table. Therefore, a friction force estimate is needed to separate out the cutting force component (F, or Fy). The recurrent (feedback) network shown in Fig. 2, carries out this decoupling process iteratively. The design issues, accuracy, convergence rate, and stability of this network are further discussed in [8].

I
P
Kmemabc Fncbon Coefficient Eshmation

IW
I I I

o:! I
I

c = cos

(wT)

Figure 4: Generic RDFT unit. The proposed estimator requires accurate estimates on physical FD parameters. If they are estimated through individual tests on the FD system, no fine tuning is needed. However, when such an identification scheme is not desired (or too costly), Dolen [8] proposes a general tuning procedure for this nonlinear estimator. 4 PERFORMANCE COMPARISONS A well-designed disturbance observer such as the one in Fig. 5 [ l o ] could be a viable alternative to the presented estimator in terms of accuracy, bandwidth, hardware cost, etc. Therefore, a detailed simulation study has been conducted to study the accuracy issues of these two competing techniques.

I -

Eshmator

Figure 2: Generic cutting force estimator. Fig. 4 shows a generic unit of the RDFT network. The units are designed to extract a particular harmonic component of a periodic waveform [9]. After spectral decomposition, high-order (time) derivatives of any harmonic component can be easily computed in frequency domain. Changing a unit's free parameters (a, b) yields a different function: Setting a = (2/N) cos(wT) and b = (2/N) sin(wT), (see Fig. 4) implements a harmonic-filtering (namely, Do) unit operating at the frequency w. Here, N refers to the length of data window while T denotes the sampling period of the network. With a = (2w/N) sin(wT) and b = (2w/N) cos(wT); a harmonic differentiation unit (a.k.a. D') could be realized.

.r_

YW

Figure 5: Continuous-time disturbance force observer. The accuracies of both methods are to be computed (at the steady state) as a function of spindle speed (a) under different conditions. A disturbance force in the form of (7) is applied to the simulated FD for a given set of harmonic frequencies:

ii
t

Fd(t) =
i

~FflCOS(n.Cf + p,)
n 4 0 , I ,41

(7)

bTi,
Figure 3: RDFT network

Since milling forces are periodic in nature, all relevant states of the FD system (e.g., velocity, current), which are affected by these forces, are periodic as well. Thus, they can be conveniently represented in frequency domain. Furthermore, as the major frequency components of the cutting force (and all the correlated signals) in milling are at DC, spindle frequency and tooth passing frequency, only a

where (p, are random numbers with U(0,2x) (uniform probability density between 0 and 2x) while F, are random variables with U(-F,F) such that IF1~(1000, 3000, 5000) [N] represents light, normal, and heavy machining conditions respectively. The (dimensionless) accuracy A@) can be calculated for a number of spindle frequencies:

The physical parameter estimates for both methods must be equivalent to make a fair comparison. To accomplish that, various tests are conducted on the simulated drives, including acceleration tests, constant speed (with no load) tests, a variety of light machining tests. The observer parameters (Je, be, T , Kt, Ks) are indirectly computed using the data obtained from these tests. The observer is then tuned to a bandwidth frequency of 100Hz. With respect to the estimator, similar tests, which additionally include medium and heavy machining conditions, are performed to obtain the additional friction process parameters. Fig. 6 illustrates the accuracy of both methods. Omitting the characteristics of acceleration estimation for both methods, the only major difference between them is that the estimator incorporates a detailed friction model. As can be seen, the estimator is significantly more accurate than the observer at almost every machining condition. The mean relative-errors can be given as 8.14% and 3.29% for the observer and the estimator respectively. Hence, the resulting accuracy improvement is by a factor of 2.5. However, it is critical to notice that the accuracy of both techniques heavily depends on the quality of estimates on the physical system parameters [lo].

database. The basis functions Y of the process being computed by estimator can then be formed with these parameters. The Recursive Least Squares (RLS) with exponential data weighting [I21 is hereby chosen as a weight adaptation (supervisory) algorithm:

e,(k)

= Fp(k) - W;(k-l)Y(k-l)

(9c)

where Wo(k) is the parameter vector E ??I4''; P(k) is error covariance matrix; h is the forgetting factor (0.95 ... 0.99) while k is the time index (k = 1,2, ...). The forgetting factor along with the initial values of WOand P dramatically affect the estimation performance of the algorithm. Also the initial spindle angle (eo), which aligns the basis functions (Y) with the estimates, plays a critical role on the accuracy. Even though a special estimator topology can be designed to detect 0 0 , it is here assumed to be known beforehand for the sake of convenience.
X-axn cuulng Force Estmator

Supervisor (RLS)

i4I

y-axlscForce E s t m a G

Selector

Figure 7: General cutting force estimator topology

6 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

Figure 6: Accuracy plots for various machining condition. 5 OVERALL ESTIMATOR TOPOLOGY The main problem in estimating the forces using the topology presented in the previous section is that when one of the drive motors of the machine is stalled, the cutting force component in that direction could not be usually evaluated due to strong Coulomb friction on the FD mechanical system (guideways and transmission system) [9]. In such a case, one of the principal cutting force components is assumed to be missing and has to be generated with the utilization of the available cutting force component at hand. To construct the unknown cutting force component, the estimator shown in Fig. 7 has been developed. In this topology, the selector in this topology simply invokes the reference (end-milling) model whenever one of the FD motors is stalled (e.g. machining is done along a fundamental axis). Thus, the supervisor adjusts the corresponding model coefficients by relying on the cutting force estimate of the running drive. Note that a crossreference process model proposed by [ I I ] is employed to compute the model coefficients of the unknown component. As a result, the missing process force F, (where p stands for either x or y) can be generated in a straightforward fashion. In this scheme, the cut geometry parameters 0 (i.e. radial and axial depth of cut) are to be retrieved from the CIM

A number of machining tests have been performed to illustrate the performance of the estimator when one of the FD motors was stalled. The relevant parameters of machining tests are given in the Appendix. With h = 0.95, the RLS algorithm is only allowed to run during one machining period. Here, the initial covariance matrix is taken as P(0) = 0.5.14~4,(I: identity matrix) while WO is initialized with the rough estimates on the cutting-force intensity coefficients (see [ I l l ) to increase the speed of convergence. In the adaptation phase, the algorithm adjusts the corresponding parameters of the model by utilizing the force estimates of the running drive. To make a fair evaluation; the (reference) model "predictions" for a stalled-drive are compared to the corresponding force measurements. Figs. 8 and 9 demonstrate the results. As can be seen, there exist some offsets between the RLS predictions and the measurements since the plowing forces at the flat-end of the cutting tool have not been incorporated to the reference model. Despite these offsets, the accuracy and bandwidth of the topology are found to be acceptable for most CNC machine tool applications.

7 CONCLUSION
This paper proposed a novel disturbance force estimator for CNC machining centers. Unlike the observer, the estimator is not sensitive to measurement noise due to RDFT based filtering/differentiation scheme. Since the proposed estimator incorporates a sophisticated friction model for the hydrodynamic guideways, it can decouple the friction forces from the principal cutting force components in an iterative fashion. Not surprisingly, its estimation accuracy was found to be significantly better

(-2.5 times) than that of a Luenberger observer. Unfortunately, the proposed estimator (as well as the observer) was not capable of estimating the cutting force component of a stalled drive due to strong Coulomb friction on the carriages of a typical machine tool. To overcome this drawback, an all-purpose solution was proposed in this paper. A general estimator topology utilizing a compact end-milling process model was developed to construct the unknown cutting process component. The performance of this topology was evaluated through a number of experimental studies. Despite some offset problems, the accuracy and bandwidth of the topology were found sufficient for most CNC machine tool applications.

[8] Dolen, M., 2000, "Modeling and Estimation by Structured Neural Networks for CNC Machine Tools," PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin - Madison. [9] Dolen, M. and Lorenz, R. D., 2000, "An Industrially Useful Means for Decomposing and Differentiation of Harmonic Components of Periodic Waveforms," in Proc. of the IEEE Ind. Apps. SOC.(IAS) Conf, vol. 2, 1016-1023. [ l o ] Lorenz, R. D., 1996, "New Drive Control Algorithms (State Control, Observers, Self-sensing, Fuzzy Logic, and Neural Nets)," in Proc. of PClM Conf., Las Vegas, 275-289. [ I l l Dolen, M., Kaftanoglu, B., and Lorenz, R. D., 2003, "Cross Reference Models for Estimating Unknown Princi pal Force Cornpo nents in End- MiIIing Process ," ClRPAnnals, vol. 52:1, 81-84. [I21 Goodwin, G. C. and Sin, K. S., 1984 Adaptive Filtering, Prediction, and Control, Prentice Hall, NJ.

Figure 8: Estimation results when Y-drive motor is stalled.

8 REFERENCES

Tonshoff, H. K, Wolfsberg, J. P., Kals, H. J. J. Konig, W., van Luttervelt, C. A,, 1988, "Development and Trends in Monitoring and Control of Machining Processes," ClRP Annals, vol. 3712, 61 1-622. Van Brussel, H., and Vastmans L., 1981, "Direct Digital Control of Feed Drives," 13t' ClRP Int'l Seminar on Manufacturing Systems, Micro-processors in Manufacturing Systems, Leuven, Belgi urn. Kulkarni, P. K., Srinivisan, K., and Johnson, W. C., 1984, "Simulation and Discrete Time Modeling of Machine Tool Feed Drive Dynamics," Proc. of the 1984 American Control Conference, San Diego, CA, 474-481. Stein, J. L., Colvin, D., Clever, G., and Wang, C. H., 1986, "Evaluation of DC Servo Machine Tool Feed Drives as Force Sensors," ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control, vol. 108, 279288. Altintas, Y., 1992, "Prediction of Cutting Forces and Tool Breakage in Milling from Feed Drive Current Monitoring," ASME Journal of Eng. for Ind., vol. 114, 386-392. Harris, T. A,, 1991, Rolling Bearing Analysis, 3/e, John Wiley 8, Sons, Inc., NY. Armstrong-Helouvry, B., Dupont, P., 1993, "Friction Modeling for Control," Proc. of the American Control Conference, San Fransisco, CA, 1905-1909.

Figure 9: Estimation results when X-drive motor is stalled. AP PENDIX Various experiments were conducted using a CincinnatiMilacron 5VC-750 vertical machining center. Table 1 tabulates the important parameters of the machining tests while Table 2 summarizes the cutting tests used to evaluate the estimator's performance. For verification purposes, the cutting force components are measured by a Kistler force dynamometer. All the signals (currents, tachogenerator voltages, force signals) are low-pass filtered using a 6th order Butterworth filter with a cut-off frequency of 800 Hz. Hence, the sampling frequency of the data acquisition board is chosen as 2.5kHz.
Workpiece R[mm] N Tool Al 7076-T6 HSS 6.35 3 ft [mmI p PI Ns[rpmI a n PI 0.0667 1 0 1 30 1 1250 Table 1: Machining parameters.

Test dz [mm]

1 5

2 2.35

Table 2: Summary of machining tests.