j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 601605

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jmatprotec

State classication of CBN grinding with

support vector machine

Neng-Hsin Chiu , Yu-Yang Guao

Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, National Kaohsiung First University of Science & Technology, Taiwan

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: When grinding high-strength ferrous alloy with CBN wheel, attention is often paid to the
CBN grinding variation of wheel surface condition to ensure work surface quality, since wheel sharp-
AE signal ness is directly related to the ground surface. The on-line wheel condition can be obtained
Process monitoring via process monitoring, which integrates the operations of process sensing, featured data
extraction, and state assessment. When grinding with wheel state under control, work qual-
ity is ensured. On-line process state recognition usually relies on a pre-built classication
model. This paper is to classify the intercepted grinding acoustic emission data using sup-
port vector machine (SVM) based on ground roughness variation during grindable period.
An SVM model was constructed from the result of a grinding experiment and conrmed to
nd an 85% of prediction accuracy.
2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The grindable interval is dened as the period between wheel

Grinding of high-strength ferrous alloy with cubic boron
nitride (CBN) wheel would require attention paid to the varia-
tion of wheel surface state, since wheel sharpness is directly
related to the ground surface and thus determining the work
quality. Upon conrmation of the unsatisfactory wheel, a
dressing operation is usually performed to restore the required
sharpness. The on-line wheel state can be obtained via process
monitoring.
The purpose of process monitoring usually includes pro-
cess control and the assurance of quality (Leea et al., 2006).
Work quality may be maintained with fault diagnostics to
detect process defect, while process control requires process
state recognition. CBN grinding is known to have stable per-
formance and long tool life, due to excellent properties of
CBN abrasive (Pecherer and Malkin, 1984). Typically, grinding
performance would best satisfy the request soon after wheel
dressing, but deteriorate as grinding proceeds. When ground
surface is no longer acceptable, wheel redressing is performed.
dressings, during which wheel condition varies and ground
surface is affected consequently.
Liu et al. (2005) utilized fuzzy pattern to detect grinding
burn with acoustic emission (AE) signals. Li et al. (2000) used
wavelet transform and fuzzy technique to monitor tool break-
age and wear conditions with spindle and feed motor currents.
Mokbel and Maksoud (2000) used Fourier transform to ana-
lyze grinding AE signal to monitor wheel condition. Yao et al.
(1999) proposed a method to detect tool wear with wavelet
fuzzy neural net using AE and fuzzy classication using feed
motor current. Obikawa and Shinozuka (2004) input an array
of wavelet coefcients from feed force into a neural network to
classify tool wear level into four categories for monitoring. Cho
et al. (2005) built a tool breakage detection system with support
vector machine (SVM) to recognize process abnormalities.
Process monitoring involves the integration of process
sensing, featured data extraction, and state assessment. State
assessment would require effective process data and a pre-
built classication model. SVM is a modied version (Cho

Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 7 6011000x2215; fax: +886 7 601 1066.
E-mail address: nchiu@ccms.nkfust.edu.tw (N.-H. Chiu).
0924-0136/$ see front matter 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2007.11.240
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et al., 2005; Sun et al., 2004) of neural network that pro- satises:
vides a compact algorithm for data classication, and can
effectively and precisely classify the collected samples. SVM 
(w xi ) + b 1 if yi = 1
was chosen in this paper to assess process state for CBN or yi (w xi + b) 1, i = 1, . . . , l
(w xi ) + b 1 if yi = 1
grinding.
(1)
Effective process data for monitoring should be related
to process performance. During grinding, a high-frequency
elastic wave is often released due to material fracture and When xi is input into the separation plane, the distance of xi
plastic deformation (Liu et al., 2005; Mokbel and Maksoud, to the plane is |(w x) + b|/|w|. The shortest distance between
2000; Yao et al., 1999; Sun et al., 2004) and can be picked the closest data and the plane is given by 1/|w|, or the plane
up by an AE sensor. Susic and Grabec (2000) conrmed with margin 2/|w|. To construct the optimal separation plane
that the ground surface property could be predicted on- is equivalent to nding the minimum for (w) = 1/2|w|2 . For
line based on the analysis of acoustic emission. Tonshoff (w) is a convex function with linear constraint, its minimum
et al. (2000) utilized a monitoring system with AE to eval- can be solved with Lagrange function. Eq. (1) can be rewritten
uate ground quality. Acoustic emission seems to be able to with Lagrange multiplier i , as:
reect the severity of grinding material removal, since the
event of grinding removal is a motion copy of wheel sur-
1  l
face. The objective of this paper is thereby to construct an L(w, b, ) = ||w||2 i (yi ((w xi ) + b) 1) (2)
SVM classication model for CBN grinding monitoring with AE 2
i=1
sensor.

Eq. (2) is then differentiated with respect to b and w, and set

2. Support vector machine to be zero for optimal condition,

Support vector machine is a mathematical tool for data clas-

L(w, b, ) = 0 and L(w, b, ) = 0 (3)
sication. Being a neural-network base system classier, SVM b w
(Vapnik, 1995) is constructed based on statistical learning the-
ory. SVM is operated via function mapping mechanism to The optimal separation plane is thus obtained with the cal-
select some support vector to represent the entire data to con- culated coefcient i , and the corresponding normal vector w
struct a classication model. Below is a brief description of as:
SVM.
l
Consider a separable data set, (xi , yi )i=1 with l as the number

l

l
of input data. SVM is to separate the data into two classes with yi i = 0 and w = i yi xi (4)
smallest error. The data is rst transferred from current space i=1 i=1
into a high-dimensional space through non-linear mapping. A
separation plane for the data is then constructed: (w x) + b =
with i > 0 for the sample xi . The so-called support vector
0, with w the normal vector of the plane and b the distance
is the vector xi that satises Eq. (1), the subset of non-zero
between the origin and the plane. When the data is separated
Lagrange multiplier. The sample with zero i gives no contri-
correctly and the distance between the plane and the input is
bution to the selection of separation plane. A decision function
minimum (with margin maximum), the data is then optimally
f(x) of the support vector is then obtained to describe the opti-
separated by the plane, as shown in Fig. 1. The problem of SVM
mal separation plane from the training samples.
is to nd the separation plane, classify the data, and construct
the model accordingly. Suppose that all the sample data xi  


f (x) = sgn((w x) + b ) = sgn i yi (xi
x) + b (5)
support vector

When the data is not linearly separable, the input can be

transformed to a high-dimensional non-linear space to con-
struct the plane. Dot product (xi xj ) can be operated in this
space with a kernel function K (xi , xj ) (Aizerman et al., 1964) to
satisfy K (xi , xj ) = (xi xj ), such that Eq. (5) is modied as:

 

f (x) = sgn l yi (xi
x) + b
support vector
 

= sgn i yi K(xi , x) + b (6)
support vector
Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of the optimized hyper plane.
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3. Construction of SVM model for CBN
grinding monitoring
As mentioned earlier, grinding monitoring involves the inte-
gration of process sensing, featured data extraction, and
process state assessment. Grinding often generates quality
surface with required geometric tolerance. Due to the excel-
lent properties of CBN abrasive, reasonable ground surface
integrity can be expected, including form accuracy, micro-
hardness, etc. While work surface may vary due to wheel
wearing. It was thereby decided that the ground roughness
was used to judge the variation of wheel state.
In this paper, grinding AE data was chosen as the input
for wheel state assessment. Typically AE signal is sampled
at high frequency as such large amount of data is collected
within short period. Without proper process, it would be dif-
cult to relate the data with the process. As is known (Liu et
al., 2005; Mokbel and Maksoud, 2000; Yao et al., 1999), two
frequency bands of grinding signal are recognized: burst type
(lower frequency band) and continuous type (higher frequency
band). The burst type signal is related to plastic deformation
between abrasives and work surface, while the continuous
type is regarded with material fracture. It was further found
(Kuo, 2006) that the energy ratio of these two bands is pro-
portional to grinding severity. Wavelet transform (Kuo, 2006;
Misisti, 2000) was used to extract and calculate the energy of
two bands from grinding signal and thus the energy ratio.
A grinding experiment for model construction was thereby
conducted. The collected grinding data, including AE data and
ground roughness, was separated into training samples and
testing data. From the training sample, the roughness data
throughout the grindable period was classied into several
Fig. 2 Variation of ground roughness and the corresponding classication for the test.
603
Table 1 Experimental conditions
Grinding wheel CBN200N100BW3X
Work material SKD11
Hardness HRc
vs (m/s) 31
vw (m/min) 6, 8
a (m) 10, 20
categories with K-means algorithm (McQueen, 1967), an algo-
rithm to cluster objects based on the attributes into some
numbers of partitions such that the minimum of the total
intra-cluster variance can be obtained. According to the clus-
tering result, the AE data for the corresponding cluster was
grouped and used as the element to build the SVM model.
The model was then veried by the testing data to show its
correctness.
4. Grinding experiment
The experiment was carried out on a Kent KCF-52 grinder
with a CBN wheel (B200N 100BW3X). The work material was
SKD 11, a typical mold steel of HRC 60, with geometric dimen-
sion: 210 mm 100 mm 21 mm. The grinding condition is in
Table 1. The work surface was roughly ground for preparation.
Before the test run, CBN wheel was properly trued and dressed.
Before grinding, a piezo-electric AE sensor of model num-
ber Kistler 8152B2 was properly setup. The grinding AE
signal was collected with an AD/DA card of model num-
ber NI-6110 at a sampling frequency of 900 kHz with a
high-pass lter at 100 kHz. Wavelet transform was directly
applied to the collected data to extract the signal with two
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frequency bands. Since CBN wheel can be operated with
long life, it would not be needed to collect all the data
throughout the experiment. It was decided that one grind-
ing pass of AE data was collected for every 5000 mm3 of
volumetric material removal until total incremental removal
exceeded 70,000 mm3 . The ground roughness was measured
and recorded after each AE data collection. Till then, the wheel
was redressed and a new workpiece was replaced for the next
run. Grinding test was performed twice for every experimental
condition.
5. Experimental results and the
constructed model
After the experiment, two groups of data were acquired:
the training samples and the testing data. The measured
ground roughness from training data for the four tests is
plotted in Fig. 2. The data throughout the experiment was
classied into four categories with K-means algorithm, as is
marked with vertical dotted line for each stage in the gures.
Two end points of each stage were recorded for every test
condition.
The accumulated removal volume for each stage of dif-
ferent conditions is different. It seems reasonable. Grinding
condition affects the progressive wear of wheel grain, thus
the wheel performance. Ground roughness is generated from
copying wheel surface onto work surface. Besides, the clas-
sication was only determined by a clustering technique.
Fig. 3 Computed AE energy ratio vs. grinding removal.
Therefore, the classied result shows so irrelevant case by
case.
The collected grinding AE signal was processed with
wavelet transform to calculate the energy of the two frequency
bands. The energy ratio (ER) was then obtained and plotted
against the grinding removal volume, as shown in Fig. 3. The
ER data increases progressively as grinding proceeds, which
is similar to the tendency of the ground roughness variation.
For all the tests, the classied stages of grinding removal from
Fig. 2 are also marked in Fig. 3 to provide a reference for observ-
ing the ER data variation. All the ER data within each stage was
then treated as the same class such that four groups of grind-
ing data were obtained throughout a grindable period. Optimal
separation plane between every successive group was thereby
built with SVM and a classication model for CBN grinding
was therefore constructed.
Testing data was then applied to verify the model. The pre-
dicted class from the data together with the corresponding
ground roughness is plotted in Fig. 4. Most of the predicted
class falls into the correct location (blue line indicates the pre-
dicted class for the corresponding data) in all the tests. Few
wrongly predicted points are those points wrapped around
with a red square in the gure. The prediction accuracy is
evaluated by comparing the predicted class with the ER data
against the class assigned by the clustered roughness data,
and was found to be better than 85%. Most of the wrong-
prediction occurs near the boundary between stages. This is
perhaps due to the location of data that confuses the operation
of SVM to wrongly classifying.
 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 601605
Fig. 4 Predicted class from SVM model and the ground roughness vs. accumulated removal of grinding.
6. Conclusions
The purpose of this paper is to construct an SVM model for the
state classication of CBN grinding with featured data from AE
signal. It has come to the following conclusions:
(1) SVM model can effectively classify the state of grinding
with predicted accuracy better than 85%. Operation of an
on-line process monitoring with SVM model can provide
instantaneous process state recognition.
(2) Energy ratio extracted from grinding AE signal can be used
to reect the progression of the ground surface roughness.
(3) The wrongly predicted class of ER data occurs only near
the boundary between stages.
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