ARTICLE IN PRESS

International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 50 (2010) 651–657

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International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture

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

Short Communication

Using detrended fluctuation analysis to monitor chattering in cutter

tool machines
Luciano Vela-Martı́nez a, Juan Carlos Jauregui-Correa b, Eduardo Rodriguez c, Jose Alvarez-Ramirez c,
a
CIATEQ, A.C. Unidad Aguascalientes, Circuito Aguascalientes Norte. 135, Parque Industrial del Valle de Aguascalientes, 20355 Aguascalientes, Aguascalientes, Mexico
b
CIATEQ, A.C. Unidad El Marques, Av. Manantiales s/n, Parque Industrial Bernardo Quintana, El Marqués, Querétaro, Mexico
c
Division de Ciencias Basicas e Ingenieria, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, Apartado Postal 55-534, Mexico D.F. 09340, Mexico

a r t i c l e in fo abstract

Article history: This paper considers accelerometer signals in order to detect chatter instabilities under different
Received 10 March 2010 spindle speed and depth of cut ratio conditions. Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), adapted for time–
Received in revised form frequency domain, was used to monitor the evolution of cutter tool dynamics. The DFA offers the
11 March 2010
advantage over traditional spectral analysis that can be deal with nonstationary, nonlinear data and, in
Accepted 28 March 2010
contrast to wavelet approaches, its application does not rely on the selection of basis functions. The
Available online 8 April 2010
underlying idea behind the application is to use the Hurst exponent, an index of the signal fractal
Keywords: roughness, to detect dominance of unstable oscillatory components in the complex, presumably
Cutter tool monitoring stochastic, dynamics of machine acceleration. Several experiments with a lab-scale cutting machine
Instability
were performed to illustrate the ability of the DFA to detect unstable cutting behavior. The results,
Chattering
presented in time–frequency domain, show that instabilities are detected in a certain frequency range
Detrended fluctuation analysis
as the Hurst exponent decreases to reflect anti-persistency of the chatter dynamics.
& 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction surface finishing, early damage and breakage of cutting tools. A

Sophisticated expensive milling machines are widely used in
modern industry for manufacturing diverse products with
improved quality and enhanced productivity. Commonly, milling
machines involves the use of cutting mechanisms whose failure
can lead to production and quality decrements. Failure can be
spontaneous due to the breakage of a cutting component or
progressive due to miss-specifications of operating conditions or
wear. Given the limited lifetime of cutting tool materials
subjected to continuous mechanical and thermal stress, the
former scenario is hardly expected under control since failure
reduction depend on well-designed maintenance policies. In
contrast, operating conditions (e.g., spindle speed and cutting
depth) can be specified in advance and controlled via automated
schemes to reduce the adverse effects on the machine compo-
nents and the product quality of unstable dynamics. Therefore, in-
process tool condition monitoring and operating conditions
control are very important to assure machining quality, system
reliability and achieving fully automated manufacturing [1].
Chattering is the most common form of instability found in
cutting machines. As a matter of fact, chattering is a condition of
instability in machining that limits productivity because of poor
 Corresponding author. Tel./fax: + 52 55 58044600.
E-mail address: jjar@xanum.uam.mx (J. Alvarez-Ramirez).
distinctive feature of chattering is its highly nonlinear nature
originated from complex phenomena involving subcritical Hopf
and period doubling bifurcations, as well as limit cycles, quasi-
periodic and chaotic behavior [2–4]. Linear and nonlinear models
have been proposed to describe observed experimental behavior
and to propose automated control strategies to reduce adverse
chattering effects [3–5]. On the other hand, direct and indirect
methods have been applied to on-line monitoring of tool
conditions. Direct methods detect the actual tool condition
relying on direct sensing while indirect methods monitor the
tool dynamics through measurements of different signals. Given
the recent advances in soft sensing and the common inability to
access directly the machine components, indirect methods are
now preferred over direct ones. Commonly used signals for
indirect methods include cutting forces [6], acoustic emission [7],
vibrations [8], current of feed motor [1] and acceleration [9].
Different signal processing methods have been proposed to deal
with these signals and extract information on the conditions of
the cutting machine. Fourier transform [10,11] and wavelets [12]
are widely used in order to present cutter tool wear or tool fault in
the frequency domain. The applicability of spectral methods are
limited by nonstationary and nonlinear data. On the other hand,
wavelets are sensitive to the specified basis functions. To avoid
these short-comings, the Hilbert–Huang transform was proposed
as a time–frequency method to detect end mill flute breakage via
the feed-motor current signals [1,13]. Fractal Hurst analysis was

0890-6955/$ - see front matter & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijmachtools.2010.03.012
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
652 L. Vela-Martı́nez et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 50 (2010) 651–657
used to monitor the instability of chattering in cutting tools [9],
showing that instabilities are related to stochastic anti-persis-
tency of the system dynamics.
This paper further explores the ability of fractal methods to
monitor the operating conditions of cutter tools by means of
acceleration signals. As in [9], the motivation relies on the fact
that measured accelerations are stochastic, nonstationary and
nonlinear signals amenable to be characterized by modern fractal
methods. In this way, the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA),
adapted for time–frequency domain, was used to monitor the
evolution of cutter tool dynamics. The DFA offers the advantage
over traditional spectral analysis that can be deal with nonsta-
tionary, nonlinear data and, in contrast to wavelet approaches, its
application does not rely on the selection of basis functions. The
underlying idea behind the application is to use the Hurst
exponent, an index of the signal fractal roughness, to detect
dominance of unstable harmonic components in the complex,
presumably stochastic, dynamics of machine acceleration. Several
experiments with a lab-scale cutting machine were performed to
illustrate the ability of the DFA to detect unstable cutting
behavior. The results, presented in time–frequency domain, show
that instabilities are detected in a certain frequency range as the
Hurst exponent decreases to reflect anti-persistency of the chatter
dynamics.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, some
concepts and results of unstable cutting dynamics are reviewed.
In Section 3, the DFA and the proposed detection strategy are
described. In Section 4, the experimental set up is described. In
Section 5, the main results are discussed. Finally we summarize
our results and make some conclusions in Section 6.
2. Unstable milling dynamics (chattering)
The aim of this work is to show that instabilities in the milling
machine, reflected as chattering, can be monitored with temporal
variations of the Hurst exponent. As a prerequisite for this task,
the nature of unstable cutting should be established. Briefly,
following [14], the milling process can modeled as a damped
delayed Mathieu equation described as follows
whðtÞ
xðtÞ _ þ o2n xðtÞ ¼ 
€ þ 2zon xðtÞ ðxðtÞxðttÞÞÞ
mt
where on is the angular natural frequency, z is the relative
damping, w is the depth of cut, mt is the modal mass of the tool.
The delayed term xðttÞ arises due to the regenerative effect,
t ¼ 60=ðzOÞ is the tooth pass period, O is the spindle speed in rpm
and z is the tooth number. The specific cutting force coefficient
h(t) is determined by the technological parameters
Nt
X 1 X M
hðtÞ ¼ gðfj ðtÞÞsinðfj ðtÞÞKt cosðfj ðtÞÞ þKn sinðfj ðtÞÞ
j¼1
where Nt is the number of teeths, Kt and Kn are the tangential and
the normal linearized cutting force coefficients, respectively, and
fj ðtÞ is the angular position of tooth j defined as
fj ðtÞ ¼ ð2pO=60Þt þ j2p=N
The screen function gðfj ðtÞÞ is equal to 1 if the tooth j is in the cut,
and it is equal to 0 if tooth j is out of cut; that is,
 FðsÞ  sH
1 if fst o fj ðtÞ o fex
gðfj ðtÞÞ ¼ ð4Þ
0 otherwise
where fst and fex is the start and exit angles of the tooth j. For up-
milling, fst ¼ 0 and fex ¼ arccosð12a=DÞ, for down-milling,
fst ¼ arccosð2a=D1Þ and fex ¼ p, where a/D is the radial depth
of cut ratio. It should be noted that due to the tooth pass
excitation effect, h(t) is time periodic with the tooth passing
period. That is, the time delay for milling processes is equal to the
time period. Eqs. (1) and (2) become a periodic delayed
differential equation whose stability depends on the spindle
speed O and the depth of cut ratio a/D. The stability of this system
can be studied by the extended Floquet theory [15–17], which
states that the stability of a linear periodic system depends on the
Floquet multipliers. If all of these multipliers are located inside
the unit disc of the complex plane, the system is asymptotically
stable. In this case, the milling dynamics evolve about a stable
fundamental vibration frequency. Unstable milling is found when
a certain number of Floquet multipliers crosses the unit circle of
the complex plane. Unstable milling is linked to the emergence of
vibration frequencies associated with Floquet multipliers outside
the unit circle. In this way, undesirable chattering can be
identified in measured milling signals (e.g., cutting force and
acceleration) as complex oscillations that dominate over the
fundamental (stable) oscillation of the process.
3. Methodology
Chattering signals are quite complex and usually noisy,
nonstationary and affected by nonlinear phenomena. In this
way, traditional spectral analysis methods (e.g., Fourier analysis)
can lead to limited performance and biased results. In this work,
the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) [18] is considered to
characterize the dynamics of milling signals. The DFA is a fractal
scaling method intended for detecting long-range autocorrela-
tions in nonstationary and nonlinear time series. The method has
found sound applications in a wide variety of science and
engineering fields, including physiology, geophysics, finance,
ecology and many more (the reader is referred to the webpage
physionet.org for a detailed list of DFA applications).
For a given stochastic time series y(i), i¼ 1,y,M, with sampling
period Dt, the standard DFA method consists in the following
steps:
PM
 Step 1. Compute the mean y ¼ 1=M j ¼ 1 yðjÞ. An integrated
time series x(i), i¼1,y,N, is then obtained as follows:
P
xðiÞ ¼ ij ¼ 1 ½yðjÞy, i ¼1,y,M.
ð1Þ
 Step 2. Divide the integrated time series x(i) into boxes of equal
size m. A linear fit, denoted by zlin ði; mÞ, is commonly used to
interpolate the sequence in each box. The interpolating curve
zlin ði; mÞ represents the local trend in each box.
 Step 3. Compute the fluctuation sequence as wði; mÞ ¼ xðiÞzlin
ði; mÞ, i ¼ 1, . . . ,M. The fluctuation function F(m) is computed as
the norm of the sequence w(i;m):
0 11=2
ð2Þ FðmÞ ¼ @ jwðj; mÞj2 A
Mj¼1
 Step 4. Repeat the above procedure for a broad range of
segment lengths m.
If the signal follows a scaling law within a given scale domain D,
ð3Þ
a power-law behavior for the fluctuation function F(s), with
s ¼ mDt, is observed
where H is called the DFA or Hurst scaling exponent, a self-affinity
parameter representing the long-range correlation (i.e., memory)
properties of the signal.The Hurst scaling exponent H is computed
as the slope of the plot logðsÞ versus logðFðsÞÞ. The lower and upper
scale limits mmin C 5 and mmax C M=5 were recommended in [18].
The underlying idea behind these guidelines is that below
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mmin C 5 the fluctuation function F(s) carries out deterministic
components induced by sampling effects. On the other hand,
above mmax C M=5 the fluctuation function is unstable for large
time scales, so a power-law is not reliable to describe its behavior.
An important problem of the DFA method is its sensitivity to
short-term memory. Therefore, in order to correct for short-range
dependence we have applied the DFA analysis to blocks of shuffled
data, i.e., one picks a random permutation of the data series within
blocks of predetermined size (in general, small size blocks) and
applies the DFA analysis to this shuffled data. This is justified due to
the Lo’s [19] critique that methods to estimate scaling (Hurst)
exponents are sensitive to the presence of short range dependence
and the effect of random permutations in these small blocks is
necessary to destroy any particular structure of autocorrelation
within these blocks. In case of having only short-range correlations
(or not correlations at all) the detrended walk profile displays
properties of a standard random walk (e.g., white noise) with
H¼0.5. On the other hand, if H o 0:5 the correlations in the signal
are anti-persistent (i.e., an increment is very likely to be followed by
a decrement), and if H 4 0:5 the correlations in the signal are
persistent (i.e., an increment is very likely to be followed by an
increment, and a decrement by a decrement). A value H-0 is
indicative of a behavior with tendency to harmonic dynamics. The
values H¼1.0 and H¼1.5 correspond to 1/f-noise and Brownian
motion, respectively. A value H 4 1:5 corresponds to long-range
correlations that are not necessarily related to stochastic processes.
Indeed, H 41:5 can be reflecting deterministic correlations.
3.1. Time–frequency DFA
Time variations of the Hurst exponent can be tracked by
performing DFA for sliding windows of size Ms . In case of having
power-law behavior of the fluctuation function for the subseries
in the sliding window, one can obtain the corresponding time-
dependent Hurst exponent H(t). However, in many practical
situations the fluctuation function F(s) can not be accurately
described by a power-law in the whole scale domain. In this case,
one can consider that the Hurst exponent is scale-dependent in
the sense that HðtÞ ¼ dFðsÞ=ds is not constant. Here, we adopted
the abfilter [20] to recursively estimate the gradient of F(s) as a
function of the time scale s. In this way, the DFA applied for a
sliding window of size Ms combined with the abfilter approx-
imation for dFðsÞ=ds gives a time- and scale-dependent Hurst
exponent H(t,s). Given the vibratory nature of cutting machines, it
is convenient to express the results in terms of the underlying
frequency computed as f ¼ s1 , resulting in time and frequency
dependency of the Hurst exponent H(t,f).
3.2. Proposed monitoring strategy
As commented in Section 2, stable milling operation is found
when the machine is operated about a well-defined stationary
trajectory. Under ideal conditions, measurements should show
milling signals (e.g., acceleration and applied force) evolving
about a stationary state. However, the complex nature of the
milling process, involving different mechanical components,
induces stochastic vibrations about the stationary state. These
vibrations are quite complex, contain high frequency components,
and should not affect the milling quality. In contrast, chattering
appears when milling dynamics undergo bifurcations via the
emergence of undesired oscillation modes. In this case, undesired
oscillations become mounted over the stable dynamics leading to
serious degradation of the machine performance. If one considers
that milling signals are stochastic, stable milling motion should be
related to persistent dynamics (H 4 0:5) that reflect a well-defined
653
machining path. If the milling process is becoming affected by
instabilities, these should affect the stochastic nature of the
milling signals. In this case, instabilities are associated with
oscillatory modes that move the stochastic dynamics from
persistency (H 40:5) to anti-persistency (H o 0:5). In the limit as
oscillatory modes dominate over the stochastic dynamics, one has
that H-0. These concepts are at the heart of the proposal to
monitor instabilities in milling machines; namely, to perform
time–frequency DFA to detect frequencies and times for which
the Hurst exponent decreases from 0.5. In turn, the approaching
of H to zero can be taken as an index of the severity of the
instability.
In a previous work [9], we used the cutting coefficients
Kt ¼ 6  108 N/m2 and Kn ¼ 0:35Kt for aluminum to estimate the
stability chart of the experimental setup described above. Besides,
the model parameters k ¼ 3:2  106 N/m and B ¼ 3:4% were used.
It was found that the vibration modes with high energy are located
at 1133 and 335 Hz. However, given the highly noisy and nonlinear
nature of acceleration signals, it is quite possible that the former is
a subharmonic component of the latter. In this way, it is apparent
that instabilities appear due to excitation of vibration modes at
about 335 Hz. As a matter of fact, this will be corroborated by the
analysis described in the following sections.
4. Experimental set-up
Milling tests were carried out on a 15 kW VF-3D HAAS VOP-D
CNC milling machine, with an Iscar 25.4 mm indexable milling
cutter APK-D1.00-1.5-W1-FE and two Sandvik indexable milling
insert R390-11 T3 08M-PM, mounted on a CAT40 ER40X3.359 E
tool holder. The workpiece material was a block of 6061
Aluminum 50:8 mm  203:2 mm  250 mm clamped on the work-
table. First, modal parameters of the cutting system were
experimentally determined by an impact testing. A Kistler 9724
instrumented hammer and a dual axis Analog Devices ADXL321
718g, 100 mV/g, 0.5 Hz, 2.5 kHz accelerometer were used. Both
signals were anti-alias filtered and sampled (40 000 samples/s)
with a National Instruments NI-USB 6251 16 bits 1.25 MS/S data
acquisition card connected to a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Dell
Precision M2300 laptop computer (see Fig. 2 in [9]).
Three experimental arrangements were studied: full, half- and
quarter-immersion of the cutting tool, defined by an a/D ratio of
100, 50 and 25%, respectively, as shown in Fig. 1 in [9]. Milling
tests were performed over a specified range of speeds and
different depths of cut. Some experimental tests were
performed at both constant depth of cut and a/D ratio of the
cutting tool, by sweeping spindle speed forward from 3500 and
5900 rpm with a step of 300 rpm; each spindle speed was held
constant during 30 mm with a feed of 400 mm/min (see Fig. 2 in
[9]). Other sample tests were performed at constant speed with
increasing depth of cut from 0 to 10 mm, by tilting the block of
aluminum at 1.81. Acceleration signals from each cutting process
were sampled at 40 kHz.
5. Results and discussion
Three experimental test were selected to illustrate the
performance of the proposed DFA approach for chattering
detection. The experimental tests and their stability with respect
to theoretical analysis are detailed in [9]. For completeness, a brief
description is made as follows:
 Test 1. Here, for a depth of cut equal to 8.0 mm, the spindle
speed was increased from 3500 and 5900 rpm with a step of
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600
550
500
450
400
350
0 5 10 15 20
Acceleration (m/s2)

520
500
480
460
440

0 5 10 15 20
500
490
480
470
460
450
0 5 10 15 20
Time, t (seconds)
Fig. 1. Experimental tests corresponding to progressive increments of the spindle speed with constant depth of cut of (a) 8.0 and (b) 6.0 mm. The third tests corresponds to
constant spindle speed with increments of the depth of cut.

8 300 rpm. As shown in Fig. 1a, the cutting tool operation

7 undergoes well-defined interlaced periods of stability and
6
Fluctuation Function, F(s)

instability. This test was used to contrast the Hurst exponent

5 results for stable and unstable conditions.
4  Test 2. As above, the spindle speed was increased from 3500
StableOperation and 5900 rpm with a step of 300 rpm. However, the depth of
3
Chattering cut was reduced to 6.0 mm. As shown in Fig. 1b, the reduced
depth of cut is reflected in less pronounced stability/instability
2 transitions.
 Test 3. For constant spindle speed of 6500 rpm, the depth of cut
was increased from 0 to 10 mm, by tilting the block of
aluminum at 1.81. Following [9], a theoretical transition from
1 stability to instability occurs at a depth of cut of about 2.8 mm.
1E-3 0.01 0.1
However, Fig. 1c shows that this transition is not so evident. In
1.50 this way, this test will be used to contrast the results obtained
from Fig. 1a.
1.25
Hurst Exponent, H(s)

1.00
5.1. Scaling structure of chattering
0.75
Fig. 2a shows the DFA results for typical stable and unstable
0.50 operations extracted from Test 1 in Fig. 1a. The fluctuation
function is increasing, although its behavior cannot be described
0.25 with a unique power law. In fact, two inflections can be observed
at time scales of about 1:5  103 and 8:0  103 s. This implies
0.00 that vibrations of the cutting tool are multiscaling, meaning that
1E-3 0.01 0.1 their behavior cannot be described by a sole power law. In this
Time-scale, s (seconds) case, abfilters were used to estimate the slope dF(s)/ds. Fig. 2b
shows the scale-dependent Hurst exponent H(s) for the two cases
Fig. 2. (a) DFA results for stable and unstable operating conditions. Note that the
fluctuation function F(s) cannot be describe with an unique power law and
in Fig. 2a. For stable and unstable conditions, and for time scales
(b) scale-dependent Hurst exponent. Important scaling differences are observed higher than 0.01 s (i.e., frequencies smaller than 100 Hz) the Hurst
for time scales smaller than about 0.01 s. exponent is smaller than 0.1. This indicates that vibrations are
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
L. Vela-Martı́nez et al. / International Journal of Machine Tools & Manufacture 50 (2010) 651–657 655

dominated by harmonic components within the small frequency
range. Interestingly, the oscillatory behavior for frequencies
smaller than 100 Hz are intrinsic to the cutting machine,
independent of the operating conditions, and are related to
fundamental dynamics of the milling machine [4]. As a conse-
quence, the scaling behavior for frequencies smaller than about
100 Hz is not useful for discrimination between stable and
unstable vibration dynamics. However, as shown in Fig. 2b,
important scaling differences are found for higher frequencies
(i.e., smaller time scales) where the Hurst exponent varies from
about 1.1 to 0.1 as vibrations undergo an instability transition. For
frequencies higher than 100 Hz, the Hurst exponent achieves
maximum values of about 1.2 for stable operation, which reflect a
persistent behavior related to stable motion of the cutting tool. In
these conditions, harmonics have a marginal effect in the machine
dynamics, which are dominated by a persistent motion along the
prescribed trajectory on the workpiece material. In contrast, the
Hurst exponent is reduced drastically for unstable chattering,
indicating that the vibrations dynamics are dominated by
harmonic components that could be related to the emergence of
Hopf bifurcations as the cutting tool goes through a stability
boundary [2–4]. These results suggest that frequencies higher
than about 100 Hz (i.e., time scales smaller than 0.01 s) can be
used to monitor the stability of the cutting tool. Besides,
instabilities should arise when the Hurst exponent is reduced to
anti-persistence (i.e., H-0) within the specified frequency range.
This result is in agreement with our previous work [9] showing
that unstable chattering modes for this system correspond to
fundamental frequencies about 335 Hz.
5.2. Time–frequency monitoring
Fig. 3 shows the Hurst time–frequency analysis for Test 1.
Fig. 1a shows that, as the spindle speed increases, the machine
alternates periods of stable and unstable operation. During
unstable operation, the vibration dynamics are dominated by
high amplitude oscillations that can lead to premature component

Fig. 3. Hurst time–frequency results for Test 1. The method is able to detect the stability changes easily appreciated in Fig. 1a.

Fig. 4. Hurst time–frequency results for Test 2. Maximum stability conditions are found at about 6 s. However, a progressive decrement of the stability margin as the
spindle speed is increased is observed. It is apparent that the cutting tool lost its stability for time higher than about 18 s.
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Fig. 5. Hurst time–frequency results for Test 3. In this case, the Hurst exponent island related to stability is not relatively small, showing that under the operating
conditions of Test 3 the cutting tool operates under marginal stability conditions.
degradation and unsatisfactory product quality. Such dominance
of harmonic components over the stochastic vibrations are
detected as abrupt decrements of the Hurst exponent for
frequencies higher than 100 Hz. Interestingly, this result
corroborates the analytical finding that instabilities appear at
fundamental frequencies of about 335 Hz [9]. As the machine
arrives into a stability region, the Hurst exponent increases to
values of about 1.0, which reflect a persistent behavior where the
machine dynamics are well-oriented toward the prescribed path
on the workpiece. Test 2 is more challenging since, given the
smaller depth of cut, stability–instability transitions are not
clearly established. The corresponding Hurst time–frequency
analysis is shown in Fig. 4. Maximum stability conditions are
found at about 6 s. However, a progressive decrement of the
stability margin as the spindle speed is increased is observed. It is
apparent that the cutting tool lost its stability for time higher than
about 18 s. It can be noted that the frequency range where the
Hurst exponent is higher than 0.5 (persistent behavior) can be
taken as an indicator of stability margin. In this way, one can note
that the operation of the cutting tool under conditions of Test 2
suffers a progressive decrement of the stability margin as the
spindle speed is increased. Finally, Test 3 corresponds to constant
spindle speed with changes in the depth of cut induced by
increments of the tilt angle. As in Test 2, the presence of stability–
instability transitions is not clearly established. More
interestingly, it is not easy to elucidate from a direct inspection
of vibrations in Fig. 1c whether the machine operates within
stable or unstable conditions. The Hurst time–frequency results
for this test are shown in Fig. 5. Maximal stability is observed for
times about 12–14 s where H  1:0. However, small stability
margin is displayed for times between 3 and 6 s when the Hurst
exponent approaches 0.5. For these operating conditions, one can
say that the cutting tool is being operated under marginal
stability, meaning that relatively small changes of the spindle
speed and depth of cut conditions may lead to severe instabilities.
6. Conclusions
This paper presented an adaptation of the detrended fluctua-
tion analysis (DFA) to monitor the stability of cutting tool
machines. The idea behind the application is that unstable
chattering arises when (nonlinear and nonstationary) oscillations
have a large effect in the cutting tool vibrations. The Hurst
exponent, an index of the roughness of the vibration signal, is able
to detect this dominance as it suffers an important decrement
when the cutting tool becomes unstable. The performance of the
proposed monitoring strategy was illustrated with experimental
signals from a lab-scale machine and the results, presented in a
time–frequency format, showed that stability–instability transi-
tions can be readily detected and quantified. In some sense, the
proposed approach is similar to wavelet methods, although DFA
offers the advantage that no basis functions should be specified. In
contrast, the main drawback of DFA is that phase information,
which can provide insights in delay effects, is not obtained.
However, given its ease implementation depending on a very
small number of tuning parameters, it is suggested to use DFA
together with previously reported methods (wavelets and
Hilbert–Hung transformation) for a mode complete and detailed
monitoring of modern milling machines.
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