Online chatter detection considering beat effect based on Inception and LSTM neural networks

Chatter is an unstable and self-excited vibration that adversely affects part quality and tool life in various machining processes. To achieve high-performance machining, chatter identification has attracted considerable interest from many researchers in recent decades. Nevertheless, most existing chatter detection approaches fail to consider the presence of the beat effect, which is an interference pattern caused by slightly different chatter frequencies. The neglect of the beat effect would seriously degrade the effectiveness of these methods and even result in false alarms. In this paper, a novel deep neural network combining the Inception module, long short-term memory (LSTM) and residual networks (ILR-DNN) is proposed for online chatter detection considering the presence of the beat effect. The ILR-DNN automatically extracts insightful features from two branches. One branch is a two-layer LSTM network that can capture temporal characteristics of the chatter development process from the raw cutting force. In the other branch, a two-layer Inception network consisting of multiple convolutional kernel size filters extracts multiscale features from the FFT spectrum of the cutting force. Afterwards, the extracted features are concatenated and go through a residual network to alleviate the gradient disappearing during deep-layer network training. Finally, the fully-connected and softmax layers are employed to make a final classification. Machining tests are carried out, and cutting forces are collected to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed chatter detection method. Results show that the proposed ILR-DNN achieves much better performance than other methods in distinguishing machining states, i.e., stable machining, chatter with the beat effect, and chatter without the beat effect.