ACWGAN-GP for milling tool breakage monitoring with imbalanced data

Tool breakage monitoring (TBM) during milling operations is crucial for ensuring workpiece quality and mini-mizing economic losses. Under the premise of sufficient training data with a balanced distribution, TBM methods based on statistical analysis and artificial intelligence enable accurate recognition of tool breakage conditions. However, considering the actual manufacturing safety, cutting tools usually work in normal wear conditions, and acquiring tool breakage signals is extremely difficult. The data imbalance problem seriously affects the recog-nition accuracy and robustness of the TBM model. This paper proposes a TBM method based on the auxiliary classier Wasserstein generative adversarial network with gradient penalty (ACWGAN-GP) from the perspective of data generation. By introducing Wasserstein distance and gradient penalty terms into the loss function of ACGAN, ACWGAN-GP can generate multi-class fault samples while improving the network's stability during adversarial training. A sample filter based on multiple statistical indicators is designed to ensure the quality and diversity of the generated data. Qualified samples after quality assessment are added to the original imbalanced dataset to improve the tool breakage classifier's performance. Artificially controlled face milling experiments for TBM are carried out on a five-axis CNC machine to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms other popular imbalance fault diagnosis methods in terms of data generation quality and TBM accuracy, and can meet the real-time requirements of TBMs.