Online Surface Roughness Prediction for Assembly Interfaces of Vertical Tail Integrating Tool Wear under Variable Cutting Parameters

Monitoring surface quality during machining has considerable practical significance for the performance of high-value products, particularly for their assembly interfaces. Surface roughness is the most important metric of surface quality. Currently, the research on online surface roughness prediction has several limitations. The effect of tool wear variation on surface roughness is seldom considered in machining. In addition, the deterioration trend of surface roughness and tool wear differs under variable cutting parameters. The prediction models trained under one set of cutting parameters fail when cutting parameters change. Accordingly, to timely monitor the surface quality of assembly interfaces of high-value products, this paper proposes a surface roughness prediction method that considers the tool wear variation under variable cutting parameters. In this method, a stacked autoencoder and long short-term memory network (SAE–LSTM) is designed as the fundamental surface roughness prediction model using tool wear conditions and sensor signals as inputs. The transfer learning strategy is applied to the SAE–LSTM such that the surface roughness online prediction under variable cutting parameters can be realized. Machining experiments for the assembly interface (using Ti6Al4V as material) of an aircraft’s vertical tail are conducted, and monitoring data are used to validate the proposed method. Ablation studies are implemented to evaluate the key modules of the proposed model. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other models and is capable of tracking the true surface roughness with time. Specifically, the minimum values of the root mean square error and mean absolute percentage error of the prediction results after transfer learning are 0.027 μm and 1.56%, respectively.