Behaviour of cutting tool vibrations with the progress of tool wear in turning hardened AISI 52100 steel: An approach to tool condition monitoring system

Hardened Steel-AISI52100 is widely used in aerospace, automotive, railways components, bearing and dies industry etc. The high hardness of such material makes it difficult to machine. When turning such materials, the cutting tool is subjected to heavy mechanical loads and hence creates vibration throughout the process, which directly affects the surface quality of a product, provoke a high rate of tool wear lowering tool life. In this context, in this work, the changing behaviour of vibration signals varying with cutting parameters and with progress of tool wear is reported during turning of hardened AISI 52100 steel. The cutting tool vibration signals in the feed, radial and tangential directions were measured using piezoelectric tri-axial accelerometer. A multiple regression models for vibration signals have been developed to understand the interrelationship between cutting tool vibrations with the progress tool flank wear. The analysis of the result revealed existence of interrelationship between cutting tool vibrations and the progress of tool flank wear irrespective of the cutting conditions selected in the present study. However, amongst the vibrations measured in feed, radial, and tangential directions, it has been observed that cutting tool vibrations in radial direction are getting more affected with the progress of the tool wear. However, all the three vibration signals found to increase drastically when catastrophic failure of the tool occurred. This study suggested that tool wear could be examined reliably by monitoring the cutting tool vibrations.