International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720

Drilling wear detection and classification using vibration signals

and artificial neural network
Issam Abu-Mahfouz ∗
Penn State Harrisburg, Mechanical Engineering Technology, 777 West Harrisburg Pike, W-255 Olmsted Building, Middletown, PA 17057, USA

Received 15 July 2002; received in revised form 9 December 2002; accepted 15 January 2003

Abstract

In automated flexible manufacturing systems the detection of tool wear during the cutting process is one of the most important
considerations. This study presents a comparison between several architectures of the multi-layer feed-forward neural network with
a back propagation training algorithm for tool condition monitoring (TCM) of twist drill wear. The algorithm utilizes vibration
signature analysis as the main and only source of information from the machining process. The objective of the proposed study is
to produce a TCM system that will lead to a more efficient and economical drilling tool usage. Five different drill wear conditions
were artificially introduced to the neural network for prediction and classification. The experimental procedure for acquiring vibration
data and extracting features in both the time and frequency domains to train and test the neural network models is detailed. It was
found that the frequency domain features, such as the averaged harmonic wavelet coefficients and the maximum entropy spectrum
peaks, are more efficient in training the neural network than the time domain statistical moments. The results demonstrate the
effectiveness and robustness of using the vibration signals in a supervised neural network for drill wear detection and classification.
 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Process monitoring; Drilling; Neural network; Perceptron; Pattern recognition; Sensors; Supervised learning; Vibration analysis

1. Introduction cess. To overcome this difficulty indirect methods are

The manufacturing community is always striving to
reduce operating costs while trying to improve product
quality and meeting or exceeding customer satisfaction.
These goals are behind the drive towards automation and
the use of high production unmanned equipment. Flex-
ible manufacturing cells with untended machining oper-
ations require the development of reliable methods of
on-line monitoring of their metal cutting operations. The
metal cutting process is highly nonlinear involving such
phenomena as plastic deformation, fracture, impact, con-
tinuous and intermittent multicontact points, friction, and
wear. Direct visual inspection of the cutting edge during
machining is not feasible because the workpiece and
chips obstruct the view. Due to the complexity of the
cutting process, it is often not possible to obtain a math-
ematical description of the relevant dynamics of the pro-
∗
Tel.: +1-717-948-6361; fax: +1-717-948-6502.
E-mail address: iaa2@psu.edu (I. Abu-Mahfouz).
required. Sensors are needed in these systems to identify
unexpected failure. Sensory systems are increasingly
playing a pivotal role in the realization of advanced auto-
mated manufacturing systems. However, it is difficult to
decide on the best parameters to measure and on the
analysis methods to adopt for the system under investi-
gation. The cost of the sensory system is another
important consideration and should be accounted for
when designing an industrial monitoring system. Com-
prehensive discussions on the design and implemen-
tation of sensor-based tool wear monitoring systems can
be found in [1,2].
The reason for acquiring the drill wear state infor-
mation is to enhance the predictive capability to allow
the machine operator to schedule tool change or regrind
just in time to avoid underuse or overuse of tools, avoid
shutdown of machines due to damage, and to minimize
scrap or rework. On the other hand, drill wear affects
the ability of the hole cutting system to satisfy specified
performance characteristics, such as hole roundness,
centering, burr formation at drill exit, and surface finish.

0890-6955/03/$ - see front matter  2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0890-6955(03)00023-3
708 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720
However, a more effective TCM system should not only
be capable of detecting the existence of drill wear but
should also be able to identify the types of wear and
forecast the remaining useful life span of the worn tool.
In most of the research conducted on drill condition
monitoring [3–9], progressive flank wear was the domi-
nant failure mode and has been extensively investigated.
Although, flank wear is a good indication of the drill
condition and has been used to indicate the severity of
drill wear, other types of wear also have an equal or
even greater influence on the hole quality and surface
finish. Typically, the failure of a drill occurs by excess-
ive wear on the flank, chisel wear, crater wear, outer
corners wear, and fracture or chipping of the cutting lip
or edge. Drill wear has a great influence on the dynamics
of the drilling process. In the following a brief literature
review of some of the work done in the field of drill
wear monitoring is presented.
Li and Wu [3] introduced a fuzzy C-means clustering
algorithm for on-line monitoring of four drill wear
grades, ‘Initial’, Small’, ‘Normal’, and ‘Severe’. The
thrust force and torque were selected as the features rel-
evant to the four drill wear states. The detection of the
grade membership of the wear state ‘Severe’ was pro-
posed as a control variable for drill replacement. The
Flank wear area was also used by Liu and Wu [4] in a
two-category linear classifier to indicate a usable or
worn-out tool. The variations of the vertical acceleration
and thrust force were chosen as their indices for drill
wear. Govekar and Grabec [5] described an adaptive
self-organizing neural network of the Kohonen type for
classification of the drill flank wear. Barton and Thanga-
raj [6] used a neural network to integrate information
extracted from the frequency domain of the machine
spindle vibration signals to predict the quality of the
hole. The cutting momentum and the feed force power
spectrum were used as the sensory part of the input vec-
tor, while the descriptive part was encoded from the cor-
responding drill flank wear. Liu and Anantharaman [7]
used back propagation with an adaptive activation-func-
tion slope neural network trained by the drilling thrust
and torque to predict flank wear. They concluded that a
9 × 14 × 1 architecture yielded the best results. The
thrust and torque signals were also used by Lin and Ting
[8] for comparing several structures and parameters of
a cumulative back-propagation algorithm with regression
models for drill flank wear monitoring. Li et al. [9]
presented a hybrid learning method to map the relation-
ship between the features of cutting vibration and the
drill flank wear condition. Their method was based on
a neural network model with fuzzy logic trained by the
r.m.s. of the frequency distribution of the vibration sig-
nals. They showed that the r.m.s. of the frequency bands
increased as the flank wear increased. El-Wardany et al.
[10] used the vibration signature in drill condition moni-
toring. They presented a study using the kurtosis of the
time domain and the area under the power spectrum
curve to monitor various types of drill wear. Liu and
Chen [11] used a backpropagation neural network for
on-line detection of drill wear to decide whether a drill
was usable or not. The input vector comprised drill size,
feed rate, spindle speed, and eight features representing
four values of torque and thrust, the average, peak value,
root mean square (rms), and the area under the time sig-
nal. Dimla et al. [12] gave a critical review of neural
network methods used in the TCM problem in metal cut-
ting.
Measuring the torque and thrust of the drilling process
requires special instrumentation such as a dynamometer
that in most cases needs special mounting fixtures. This
can influence the dynamic and stiffness characteristics
of the drilling system. Acoustic emission (AE) sensors
are usually more expensive than most industrial acceler-
ometers. AE sensors also have greater demands on sam-
pling rate, noise filtering, data storage and retrieval
memory, speed of processing and analysis. These greater
demands are mainly due to the fact that AE sensors are
used to pick up higher frequency signals resulting from
material deformation, fracture, and chip breakage.
Accelerometers are simple to operate and are very suit-
able for wear monitoring because they offer the follow-
ing advantages:
앫 No effect on stiffness and damping properties of the
drilling system;
앫 Can be easily mounted close to the cutting action,
independent of tool or workpiece;
앫 When properly shielded, they have good resistance to
coolants, chips, electromagnetic or thermal influ-
ences;
앫 Accelerometers are easily replaceable and are very
cost-effective.
Artificial neural network algorithms are regarded as
multivariate nonlinear analytical tools capable of reco-
gnizing patterns from noisy complex data and estimating
their nonlinear relationships. Their major advantages
include superior learning, noise suppression, and parallel
data processing capabilities. The objective of this study
is to demonstrate the performance of an Artificial Neural
Network approach based on vibration signals for the
detection, and characterization of twist drill wear and
damage. In this paper the artificial neural network term
will be referred to simply as ‘ANN’, and the feed-for-
ward back propagation term will be referred to as
‘FFBP’.
2. Experimental set-up
Fig. 1 shows a schematic presentation of the experi-
mental set-up. Conventional uncoated high-speed-steel
 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720 709

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the experimental set-up.

(HSS) twist drills with diameter 12.7 mm (0.5 inch) were

used in the tests. Fig. 2 presents the nomenclature and
geometry of a conventional twist drill. Five types of drill
wear were artificially induced on the drill point, as
shown in Fig. 3, and these are:

1. Chisel wear: normally occurs due to the very high

shear and compressive stresses in the flow zone of the
tool-workpiece interface acting at high temperatures,
which causes erosion of the chisel edge.
2. Crater wear on the rake face of one cutting edge.

Fig. 3. Five types of artificially induced drill wear. Drawings are not
to scale (all dimensions are in mm).

Crater wear is due to high temperature conditions

along the rake surface.
3. Flank wear on the two flank or clearance faces of
the lips.
4. Fracture or breakage on one lip of the cutting edge.
5. Wear on both outside corners of the drill point. This
is due to high friction (rubbing) and impact forces
between the drill and the machined hole walls.

Fig. 2. Nomenclature and geometry of conventional twist drill. Drilling experiments were performed on a Bridgeport
710 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720
3-axis CNC vertical milling machine. The work material
used in this research was a 1040 carbon steel. The work
piece hardness was measured to be 235 BHN.
One accelerometer (model PCB IMI-607A61) with a
sensitivity of 10.2mV/(m/s2) and a measurement range
of ± 490m/s2, was used to measure the vibration signals.
As shown in Fig. 1, the accelerometer was mounted on
the clamping fixture of the work piece. The analog sig-
nals from this sensor were fed into a PCP 482-series
Charge amplifier and then to a National Instruments PCI
data acquisition board, with a sampling rate capability
of 1.2 MHz, for signal digitization and conditioning. A
Pentium III (650 MHz and 256 MB RAM) was used for
data collection, analysis and neural network training and
testing. The vibration signals were recorded only during
steady state cutting, i.e., not including the penetration
and exit stages of the drilling process. Drilling tests were
performed at four sets of cutting conditions listed in
Table 1, which are used for off-line training and testing.
Two other sets of cutting conditions were later used for
generalization testing of the ANN. All experiments were
performed under dry cutting conditions. The cutting
speed and feed were two input features to the ANN.
3. Signal analysis and feature extraction
(preprocessing)
Current economic aspects pertinent to production
automation and untended machining, place great con-
straints on tool condition monitoring techniques and
practices. For best performance of the monitoring sys-
tem, only those features which show a high sensitivity
to tool wear and low sensitivity to process parameters
should be utilized. In this study, vibration based fault
symptoms were used for the drill wear detection and
classification. Vibration analysis is widely accepted as a
tool to monitor the operating conditions of a machine
as it is nondestructive, reliable and permits continuous
monitoring without intervening with the process. This
section discusses the signal analysis and data reduction
techniques used to extract the necessary features and
time invariant indices used for ANN training and testing.
The following indices were chosen for the feature vector:
Table 1
Cutting conditions used for the drill wear experiments
Speed (rpm) Feed (mm/min)
Cutting conditions used for 300 400
training and testing the ANN 400 300
600 200
900 150
Cutting conditions used 350 400
only for testing the ANN 1000 130
3.1. Time-frequency by harmonic wavelets
A simplified form of the harmonic wavelet analysis,
presented in [13], was utilized here as one method for
feature extraction from the vibration signals of the drill-
ing process. Time-frequency wavelet analysis is con-
cerned about correlating an input signal f(t) with a wave-
let base function f(t). The wavelet coefficient c(t) is
defined by the following correlation equation
c(t) ⫽ 冕 ⫹⬁
⫺⬁
f(t) f∗(t⫺t) dt, (1)
where f∗(t) is the complex conjugate of f(t), t is a time
parameter, and t is the center of f along the time axis
t. Transforming this Eq. (1) from the time domain to the
frequency domain, using the Fourier transform becomes
C(w) ⫽ F(w) f∗(w), (2)
where the following definitions apply
冕
⫹⬁
1
C(w) ⫽ c(t)e(⫺iwt)dt,
2p ⫺⬁
F(w) ⫽
1
2p 冕⫺⬁
⫹⬁
f(t)e(⫺iwt)dt,
(3)
and
f(w) ⫽ 冕 ⫺⬁
⫹⬁
f(t)e(⫺iwt)dt.
The Discrete Fast Fourier Transform (DFFT) algor-
ithm was used in computing the above Fourier trans-
forms. Following a similar method as in [13], a simple
wavelet with a boxcar spectrum was used. This means
that f(w) was zero everywhere except in a finite band
of frequencies where it was assigned a value of unity.
256 wavelets, used within a segment of 4096 data points,
equivalent to 2048 Nyquist frequency points, were cal-
culated as follows:
1. The input f(t) time history of the vibration signal was
represented in segments of 4096 data points.
2. The DFFT algorithm was used to give the 2048 Four-
ier Coefficients F(w).
3. The following Fourier Coefficient multiplication was
performedCi = Fi fi∗, i = 0⫺2047.
4. The IFFT (inverse FFT) of the generated series was
computed to obtain the cr(t) , r = 0⫺2047.
5. 16 averaged wavelet coefficients were extracted from
the result of step 4 by grouping and averaging each
adjacent 128 Coefficients cr(t) .
The 16 averaged harmonic wavelet coefficients (HWCs)
form a feature vector which served as an input pattern
to the neural network. Fig. 4 displays the 16 HWCs as
 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720 711

Fig. 4. FFT, 16 HWC, and Burg Power Spectra for 12.7 mm twist drill cutting at 300 mm/min, and 400 rpm, (a) new drill, (b) chisel wear, (c)
crater wear, (d) flank wear, (e) edge fracture, and (f) outer corner wear (Cutting at 440 mm/min, and 570 rpm).

a histogram under the FFT plot for two of the sample
cutting conditions.
3.2. Maximum entropy spectral analysis (MESA)
The Burg algorithm [14] and [15], a parametric spec-
MESA and their corresponding location in the frequency
domain were presented as another input feature vector
to the ANN. The MESA method computes the power
spectral density from the Burg algorithm [15],
PM
Sxx(f) ⫽ (4)

| 冘
M 2
tral estimation method, was used to give an estimate of
the power spectral density (PSD) of the discrete-time for
the vibration signals. The Burg method gives a smoothed
2fs 1 ⫹
m⫽1
Amexp(⫺jpmf⌬t)
|
PSD presentation, compared, for example to the Welch where PM is the residual power of the Mth order autore-
method, plus it is computationally efficient. In this study, gressive prediction error filter (PEF), with coefficients
the highest eight local maxima of the Burg PSD or Am, while fs is half the sampling frequency. After some
712 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720

Fig. 4. Continued

numerical experimentation with the vibration signals

冘
N
1
obtained for this study, the filter order M in Eq. (4) was m ⫽ x̄ ⫽ xi, (5)
N i⫽1
selected to be 32.
where xi was the instantaneous amplitude of the
3.3. Statistical measures in the time domain vibration signal.
The variance V = s 2 of the data segment was nor-
In order to quantify objectively the vibration signal in malized by N⫺1 (where N = 4096 samples), and it is
the time domain, it was evaluated by means of four stat- the mean square value about the mean:
istical parameters. These parameters where the mean µ,

冘
the variance V, the Kurtosis K, and the skewness S and N

they were calculated as follows: (xi⫺x̄)2

The mean (µ) calculates the vibration signal average V ⫽ s2 ⫽
i⫽1
. (6)
for N = 4096 samples: (N⫺1)
 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720
The skewness (S) is a measure of the asymmetry of
the data around the sample mean. The skewness of a
normal distribution (or any perfectly symmetric
distribution) is zero. The skewness is the third statistical
moment of a distribution and is defined as:
E(x⫺m)3
S ⫽ , (7)
s3
where E(x) is the expected value of x.
The kurtosis (K) is a measure of how outlier-prone a
distribution is [16]. The kurtosis of a normal distribution
is 3. Distributions that are more outlier-prone than a nor-
mal distribution have a kurtosis greater than 3; distri-
butions that are less outlier-prone have a kurtosis less
than 3. The kurtosis of a distribution is the fourth statisti-
cal moment and is defined as:
冘 (xi⫺x̄)
N 4
1
K ⫽ (8)
Ni ⫽ 1 s4
where x̄ is the average vibration amplitude or mean m.
In [10] it was demonstrated that the kurtosis was rather
sensitive to the occurrence of spikes or impulses in the
time domain of the vibration signal.
Fig. 5 shows samples of the four statistical parameters
Fig. 5. The influence of the number of vibration signal data points used in calculating the four statistical measures for the ANN (a) kurtosis, (b)
skewness, (c) standard deviation, and (c) variance.
713
listed above. In most cases these parameters tend to
reach a constant value for a discrete time history segment
of at least 6000 points. The four parameters at 8000 data
samples for each time record were considered as input
features to the ANN. The preprocessing techniques illus-
trated above were the result of extensive trials using vari-
ous quantifying descriptions and were found to lead to
the best network performance. One reason for combining
different signal analysis subroutines was to reduce the
sensitivity of the TCM system to variables other than
tool wear condition. Another reason was that more than
one type of wear might develop at different locations of
the drill point at the same time.
4. Artificial Neural Network (ANN)
Recent work in the field of artificial neural networks
has proven that they can be particularly useful in the
modeling of nonlinear mapping and in the recognition
of distinctive features from incomplete or chaotic input
data. The power of a neural model depends on how many
neurons there are, how they are connected and how each
neuron operates. Back propagation is a supervised algor-
714 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720
ithm consisting of the training and testing phases, [17]
and [18]. Training is carried out by presenting to the
neural model a sequence of examples of the problem to
be solved. The training set is sometimes called the input
stimuli (or epoch). The number of epochs must be large
enough to perform the training process adequately so
that generalization behavior of the classifier is assured.
These epochs are in the form of input data, together with
the expected neural model output. In supervised learn-
ing, the model weights are repeatedly and adaptively
modified to make the model’s output agree with that
specified in the training data. The weighted sum is
passed to a transfer function to calculate the output of
the node. The output of the transfer function is then fed
to the input of another node (neuron) in a neural model.
Another, different, set of input-output facts, called the
test set, which was not used in the training stage is then
used to verify the performance of the ANN model.
Fig. 6 (a) shows the architecture of the three-layer
feed-forward back-propagation (FFBP) ANN used in
this research. On the left is the layer of inputs, or branch-
ing nodes, which are not artificial neurons. Neurons in
the input layer act as buffers for distributing the input
Fig. 6. (a) Standard supervised training feed-forward neural network,
and (b) the perceptron.
feature data x = (x1,...,xN) to neurons in the hidden layer.
The middle, or hidden layer contains artificial neural
nodes, as does the output layer on the right. The hidden
layer is used to process and connect the information from
the input layer to the output layer only in a forward
direction. The hidden layer performs feature extraction
on the input data. Only one hidden layer was used in
the present study. Each neuron in the hidden layer (Fig.
6 (b)) sums up its input signals after weighting them
with the strengths of the respective connections wnm and
computes its output ym as a function of the sum;
冉冘 冊
N
ym ⫽ h wnmxn , (m ⫽ 1,...,M). (9)
n
The outputs of the neuron in the output layer zj are
computed similarly,
zj ⫽ g 冉冘 冊
M
m
umjym , (j ⫽ 1,...,J). (10)
Here, we take h = g=f, where f() can be a simple thres-
hold function or a sigmoidal, hyperbolic tangent or radial
basis function. This ANN used a unipolar sigmoid (S-
shape) non-linear activation function [18]
1
f(s) ⫽ , (11)
[1 ⫹ exp(⫺a(s⫺b))]
where a is the decay (growth) rate, b is the bias or the
s-axis center of asymmetry. This function acts as a thres-
hold activation to obtain a nonlinear ‘warping’ that
pushes the output values toward the binary decision
values 0 or 1. The exponenial rate a and the bias b were
fixed and not adapted in this algorithm. The synaptic
weights (wnm,umj) were initially selected at random
between ⫺0.5 and 0.5. During the training phase, the
weights were repeatedly adjusted by some method (in
this case the steepest descent method) to force each of
the input exemplar feature vectors x(q), (q = 1,..,Q) to be
mapped into an output vector z(q) closer to its correct
target t(k(q)) than to any other identifier t(p) , p ⫽ k. This
means that the error e(q) = |z(q)⫺t(k(q))| must be very small
for each exemplar q. In this study the number of output
neurodes J was taken to be equal to the number of
classes K, which in turn was equal to the number of drill
states {K = 6: 5 drill wear states + the state of a new
(sharp) drill}. All nodes of the target vector t(k(q)) were
put equal to 0.05 ( ⫽0) except at the output neuron rep-
resenting the correct drill wear type, which took a value
of 0.95 ( ⫽1). Using 0.05 for 0 and 0.95 for 1 cause
less saturation and quicker convergence [18]. Using the
steepest descent linearization for updating the weights
(wnm,umj) on the (r + 1)st iteration, gave
 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720 715

w(r+1)
nm ⫽ wnm
(r)
⫺h1 冉 ∂E(w(r),u(r))
∂wnm 冊
⫹ g1[wnm
(r)
⫺w(r⫺1)
nm ]

冉 冊
(12)
∂E(w(r),u(r))
u(r+1)
⫽ u ⫺h2
(r)
mj mj
∂umj
⫹ g2[umj
(r)
⫺u(r⫺1)
mj ],
where,

冘
J

E(w,u) ⫽ (tj⫺zj)2, (13)

j⫽1

was the partial sum-squared error, which needs to be

minimized for any fixed qth exemplar pair (x(q),t(q)),
(h1,h2) were the learning rates, and (g1,g2) were the
momentum coefficients. The weights were adaptively
changed until the network ‘learned’ all of the input train-
ing patterns. This adaptation carried information about
sensory features and drill wear descriptors, and therefore
described the relations between them. In order to prevent
the saturation of the activation function, the data sets
used for training were normalized to fall in the interval
(0,1) before they are introduced to the ANN input layer.
The normalized input data (xi) then becomes:
i ⫺min(xi )
xold old
xnew
i ⫽ . (14)
max(xi )⫺min(xold
old
i )

The training parameters, namely the learning rate h

and momentum coefficient g, were chosen by experimen-
tation with different values in the range (0.01,0.5). The
FFBP algorithm is summarized in Appendix B. The
learning process was terminated (i.e., ANN had
converged) when, for each qthexemplar vector, the cal-
culated output z(q) was close to the desired target vector
t(q) within an acceptable error threshold value (E ⬍
Ethr = 0.05). If not, the training was terminated after
5000 iterations of weight update. The instantaneous
error E for each input feature vector x(q) was calcu-
lated as:
Fig. 7. Artificial Neural network architecture for (a) separate group
training; FFBP-I, FFBP-II, FFBP-III, (b) decoupled (grouped) training
FFBP-ALL, and (c) coupled (un-grouped) training FFBP-Full.
4. FFBP-ALL: Input all of the above parameters keeping
the three groups (decoupled) between the input and
hidden layer (18 hidden neurons).
5. FFBP-FULL: Input all parameters and make full con-
nections (coupling) between the neurons in the input
and hidden layers, as in Fig. 7 (b), (18 hidden
neurons).

冪冘(t
J
1
E(q) ⫽ (q)
j ⫺zj(q))2. (15) The concatenated vector {(16 HWC), (eight MESA
J
j
peaks, and their eight frequencies), (four statistical
The weights were further updated through learning as moments), (cutting speed), (cutting feed)}, comprising
more and more exemplar patterns (q = 1,...,Q) were 38 components altogether, was used as an input to the
given to the ANN. FFBP-ALL and FFBP-FULL ANNs. The number of
Five connective structures, shown in Fig. 7, were nodes in the hidden layer should be small enough to
taken as follows: reduce noise and weight drift, but sufficiently large to
increase mapping accuracy. In this study no attempt was
1. FFBP-I: Input only the 16 HWCs feature vector and made to determine the optimum number of neurons in
branch to six hidden neurons. the hidden layer M or the number of hidden layers
2. FFBP-II: Input only eight Burg spectrum peaks and required for optimum performance of the ANN. How-
their frequencies and branch to six hidden neurons. ever, it was proposed to use as few processing elements
3. FFBP-III: Input only four statistical parameters and as possible. This was because the use of more processing
branch to six hidden neurons. elements in the hidden layer not only required a larger
716 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720

number of training iterations to converge but also added

additional CPU load for the tool failure diagnosis in real-
time analysis. The number of neurons in the hidden layer
for each feature vector was chosen to be equal to six
which was the same number as the classes in the target
vector. No adjoining or pruning of hidden neurons were
exercised during training. Each model used 100 epochs
for training. Each epoch was composed of six feature
vectors (six classes) and the corresponding target vectors
(drill status).

5. Results and discussion

Drill wear introduces changes in the drill point
geometry that lead to unbalanced cutting forces which
subsequently cause a wandering motion and impacts
between the drill and the wall of the hole. From Fig. 4, it
is clear that various drill wear patterns result in different
vibration signatures in the FFT, HWC, and the PSD
plots. The erratic (aperiodic) nature of the cutting pro-
cess dynamics is evident from the broadband nature of
the FFT spectra. The frequency bands (0–1000 Hz),
(around 2000 Hz), (3500–4500 Hz), and (7000–8500
Hz) show distinctive features that support separation
Fig. 9. Correct predictions of wear classes as a function of the num-
ber of feature vectors used for testing and further training.
between the wear classes. As discussed in the previous
section, the FFT coefficients were not used in training
the ANN, instead the information manifested by the
HWC and the Burg PSD were considered. This helps
reducing the feature vector dimension making training
more practical and less expensive. Experimental results
are presented to verify the feasibility of this intelligent
tool failure diagnosis system in drilling operations.

Fig. 8. (a)–(e) Root mean square (RMS) error of the ANN output vs the number of iterations for different ANN architectures. (f) Number of
iterations to reach RMS error ⬍ 0.05.
 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720 717

Fig. 8 shows the normalized root mean square (rms)
error (Eq. (15)) of the output of the neural network
against the number of iterations for different ANN mod-
els. The results were recorded during the early training
phase (i.e., 10th epoch) and the error E was recorded
every 100 iteration up to 5000 iterations. The FFBP-III
was able to converge much faster than all other models
for all wear classes. Fig. 8 (f) summarized the conver-
gence speed of all the models by plotting the number of
iterations each model took to reach a normalized value
of E (Erms ⬍ 0.05). All models, with exception of FFBP-
FULL, are seen to converge after 4000 iterations. The
FFBP-FULL model took more iterations than the FFBP-
ALL to converge within the specified error threshold. It
can also be deduced that the speed of convergence
depends somewhat on the type of wear. In general, the
convergence was faster for the chisel and crater classes
and slower for the edge and corner classes of drill wear.
The FFBP-I, trained on the four statistical parameters,
was not sensitive in its convergence speed to drill wear
type. These phenomena were observed in most train-
ing epochs.
Table 2 presents percentages of correct predictions
averaged over 100 test samples for each wear class. The
test phase helps the ANN model to generalize and
increases its declaration accuracy. The numbers indicate
that the best performance was obtained by FFBP-ALL
followed by FFBP-III and FFBP-FULL and then FFBP-
II and FFBP-I, in that order. More correct classifications
were made for the chisel and crater cases. On the other

Table 2
Performance of FFBP with different network structures during testing phase of the ANN

ANN Structure Speed (rpm) Feed (mm/min) Percentage of Correct Predictions

Chisel Crater Flank Edge Corner

300 400 85 82 76 81 77
400 300 88 81 75 82 78
600 200 87 79 72 85 73
FFBP-I 900 150 83 78 72 77 71

350 400 84 80 78 75 78
1000 130 80 75 71 75 68

300 400 92 88 87 90 88
400 300 94 92 89 90 89
600 200 94 91 89 91 88
FFBP-II 900 150 89 90 82 90 87

350 400 88 89 85 88 82
1000 130 89 88 79 86 84

300 400 92 91 91 93 90
400 300 95 92 90 93 90
600 200 96 92 90 94 91
FFBP-III 900 150 93 93 90 95 90

350 400 88 90 88 92 90
1000 130 92 90 89 93 85

300 400 93 91 90 92 89
400 300 96 94 91 95 91
600 200 94 94 93 95 91
FFBP- 900 150 94 92 92 93 90
ALL
350 400 94 91 88 88 86
1000 130 90 90 92 85 85

300 400 91 89 91 88 90
400 300 92 91 91 89 87
600 200 90 90 90 92 88
FFBP- 900 150 95 90 86 92 87
FULL
350 400 91 90 89 84 86
1000 130 88 85 85 82 84
718 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720

hand, for the flank and corner wear classes, the ANN
models sometimes missed or mixed up these two classes.
It was noticed that the frequency response and the spec-
tral measures of drills with the flank wear and outer cor-
ner wear shared some similarities, which could be the
source of the prediction difficulty. In order to further
verify the feasibility of diagnosing drill failure using a
neural network, the five ANN architectures were tested
with drilling data under conditions different from those
used for training the network {(350 rpm, 400 mm/min)

Fig. 10. Online testing of the trained ANN; (a) corner wear, (b) flank wear, (c) crater wear, (d) chisel wear, and (e) edge breakage.
 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720
and (1000 rpm, 130 mm/min)}. The performance of all
models was satisfactory, though less accurate than the per-
formance for the four cutting conditions used for training.
Fig. 9 shows other averaged results during the testing
phase of the trained ANN. This figure shows the percent-
age number of test set presentations where the ANN suc-
cessfully identified the wear type against the number of
test presentations. Test feature vectors were presented
to the trained ANN at random. In the case of incorrect
prediction, the same feature vector was used for further
training of the ANN. A total of 100 vectors, different
from those used to construct Table 2, were used in this
test-and-train phase. From these results it can be deduced
that the accuracy of the trained ANN does not increase
significantly after 60 test-and-train presentations. This
number could be satisfactory for industrial implemen-
tation purposes. The size of the neural network shows
no significant effect on the accuracy of tool wear esti-
mation in this case. Overall, the results displayed in Fig.
9 agree with the predictions of Table 2.
For purposes of illustration, Fig. 10 shows the nor-
malized output z(q) of the ANN after it was presented
with I = 200 epochs. The uni-polar sigmoid activation
function output was from 0 to 1, which formed a meas-
ure of the prediction weight for every wear condition.
As presented in Fig. 10, the position of the output neuron
with the maximum descriptor value determines the drill
wear class to which the input signal feature vector was
maximally correlated. Ideally, the types of wear that do
not exist should show a neural output of zero, but here
their neurons show values greater than zero. Neverthe-
less, the results were very acceptable for online tool
monitoring. Thresholds to predict tool failure for hole
quality and surface finish can be designated at appropri-
ate output values (0.4 in Fig. 10). An alarm or machine
control system can be triggered when one or more of
the output neurons increase beyond this threshold. Tool-
life prediction models and threshold parameter settings
can therefore be automated as manufacturing process
control features for drill replacement and/or regrind
scheduling.
6. Conclusion
A multiple layer neural network has been successfully
applied to twist drill wear detection and classification
using supervised learning with experimentally obtained
vibration data. The performance of both coupled and
decoupled different configurations of the ANN has been
analyzed. The signals, collected from extensive exper-
imentation, were analyzed using the following tech-
niques, discrete harmonic wavelet transform, Burg
power spectral density (PSD), and four statistical meas-
ures of the time domain. The ANN algorithm success-
fully mapped the vibration signals to the appropriate
classes of drill wear. During the testing phase, a success
719
rate of 100% was obtained for detection of the existence
of drill wear, and a rate greater than 80% for success
in drill type classification was realized. For some ANN
configurations the rate of accurate classifications was
greater than 90%. The decoupled neural networks have
not been found to possess significant advantages over
the fully connected networks. However, decoupling of
input groups of data enhances convergence rate during
training. The ANN performance is found to be sensitive
to the type of input data. The HWC and the Burg spec-
trum peaks helped the ANN to learn more about the drill
wear than the four statistical moments, with the wavelet
coefficients being superior to the PSD. The ANNs were
found to accommodate satisfactorily changes in the cut-
ting conditions. The results reveal that once the neural
network was properly trained, it become a powerful and
reliable tool in solving classification and pattern recog-
nition problems such as in this drilling process monitor-
ing application. The results strongly suggest that
vibration signals have tremendous promise for tool con-
dition monitoring and manufacturing process diagnos-
tics. The models discussed in this work are also appli-
cable to the monitoring of other machining processes,
for example; turning, milling, and grinding.
Appendix A
The following notation applies to the FFBP ANN:
ai Decay (growth) rates {i = 1 (hidden layer)),
and, i = 2 (output layer)}
bi Biases {i = 1 (hidden layer)), and, i = 2
(output layer)}
gi Momentum coefficient
I Number of epochs
J Number of output nodes
K Number of exemplar output target vectors
{t(k(q))}k=1,K
(classes of drill wear)
M Number of nodes in the hidden layer
N Number of nodes in the input layer
Q Number of exemplar features
{x(q)}q=1,Q
obtained from the processed signals picked up
by the sensory system
mmj Synaptic weights on the input lines of the
output layer
wnm Synaptic weights on the input lines of hidden
layer, and
hi Learning rate
720 I. Abu-Mahfouz / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 43 (2003) 707–720

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