Online Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Milling Cutters Based on Multisource Data and Feature Learning

A milling cutter is one of the most important parts of machine tools. Its working status significantly influences the precision of workpiece. Due to the complex wear mechanism, the single sensor may be difficult to acquire the complete degradation information of milling cutters. Therefore, in this article, a feature learning based method is proposed to automatically extract features from multisource data and predict the remaining useful life of cutting tools in real time. First, a statistic-based method is constructed to detect and delete the outliers hidden in the monitoring data. Second, the clean data are input into a multiscale convolutional attention network (MSAN) to learn features and fuse multisource data. At last, the fused data are used to predict the remaining useful life of cutting tools in a regression layer. Compared with traditional tool life prediction methods, the proposed method is able to fuse multisource data through an attention feature learning model to conduct the life prediction of tools. Additionally, the data cleaning and model optimization methods are also proposed to promote engineering practicability. To validate the effectiveness of such method, the life testing experiments on milling cutters are conducted to obtain run-to-failure data. In those experiments, multisensor monitor data are acquired, which are used to conduct validation experiments testing the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results indicate the superiority of the proposed method in remaining useful life prediction milling cutters.