Chatter Detection in Thin-Wall Milling Based on Multi-Sensor Fusion and Dual-Stream Residual Attention CNN

Abstract

Thin-walled parts exhibit high flexibility, rendering them susceptible to chatter during milling, which can significantly impact machining accuracy, surface quality, and productivity. Therefore, chatter detection plays a crucial role in thin-wall milling. In this study, a chatter detection method based on multi-sensor fusion and a dual-stream convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed, which can effectively identify the machining status in thin-wall milling. Specifically, the acceleration signals and cutting force signals are first collected during the milling process and transformed into the frequency domain using fast Fourier transform (FFT). Secondly, a dual-stream CNN is designed to extract the hidden features from the spectrum of multi-sensor signals, thereby avoiding confusion when learning the features of each sensor signal. Then, considering that the characteristics of each sensor are of different importance for chatter detection, a joint attention mechanism based on residual connection is designed, and the feature weight coefficients are adaptively assigned to obtain the joint features. Finally, the joint features feed into a machining status classifier to identify chatter occurrences. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, a series of milling tests are conducted. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately distinguish between stable and chatter under various milling scenarios, achieving a detection accuracy of up to 98.68%.