Predictive Model for Specific Energy

Consumption in the Turning

of AISI 316L Steel

Dagnier-Antonio Curra-Sosa1(&), Roberto Pérez-Rodríguez1,

and Ricardo Del-Risco-Alfonso2
1
CAD/CAM Study Center, University of Holguín, 80100 Holguín, Cuba
dcurra85@gmail.com
2
CEEFREP, University of Camagüey, 70400 Camagüey, Cuba

Abstract. This article presents an approach for the simulation of machining

operations through Artificial Intelligence, which guarantees an automatic
learning of the distinctive features in the processes of metal cutting. In the
research, an Artificial Neural Network was designed, which establishes the
relationships between the parameters of cutting regime and the technological
indexes of machining, based on the information generated in real experimen-
tation. For the conception of suitable cutting strategies, the following magni-
tudes were considered for the input of the model: lubrication regime, cutting
speed, feed rate and machining time; which determined the behavior of the
cutting forces in the turning of the AISI 316L steel, in order to obtain the cutting
powers that define the specific energy consumption. Several designs were
considered according to the features of Multi-Layer Perceptron architecture and
the selected model was evaluated according to the mean square error and the
regression coefficient R2, reflecting high precision in the approximation. The
deviation for the error made in the estimation of the cutting force values rep-
resents approximately 2% of the average value. These results showed a good
level of reliability in the prediction of energy consumption under various
machining conditions, in order to adopt relevant saving measures.

Keywords: Specific energy consumption
Turning
AISI 316L steel

Predictive model
Artificial neural network

1 Introduction

The demand for high quality mechanical components, high accuracy and shorter
delivery times for high performance systems has increased considerably in recent years
worldwide. This fact has led to the development of new technologies applied to
machining processes [1]. The energy consumption and the efficiency of processes
constitute a matter of great importance for the universities and industry, for which it is
necessary that the international organizations have sustainable strategies, that support
the decision-making and contribute to mitigate the high prices in energy production and
associated environmental problems.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018

Y. Hernández Heredia et al. (Eds.): IWAIPR 2018, LNCS 11047, pp. 51–58, 2018.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01132-1_6
52 D.-A. Curra-Sosa et al.

There is a growing social commitment towards the development of manufacturing

systems and strategies with a minimum environmental impact that allows the appli-
cation of sustainable manufacturing. Preliminary environmental studies for machine-
tools in material removal processes (for example: turning, milling, etc.) indicate that
more than 99% of the environmental impacts are due to the consumption of electrical
energy [2, 3]. Therefore, the reduction of the electric power consumption of the
manufacturing processes not only economically benefits the manufacturers but also
improves their environmental performance.
Some of the problems that arise in the machining process are related to the lack of
data and appropriate models. This situation is exacerbated by the continuous devel-
opment and introduction of new tools and work materials, as well as changes in
machining conditions [4]. In several investigations have been referenced to the com-
putational methods that respond to Machine Learning, and especially, to Artificial
Neural Networks (ANN), as non-linear prediction instruments, in the forecasting of
indexes based on having databases that characterize the modeled phenomenon.
Among the most used architectures, the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) has proved
to be adequate in inference with a high level of precision, as demonstrated [5] when
modeling the constitutive flow behavior of stainless austenitic steel under hot defor-
mation. Other more recent results were provided by [6] when modeling the thrust
forces in the drilling of AISI 316, [7] in the prediction of cutting conditions in CNC
lathes, [8] study the effect of design variables on the measures calculated for sustain-
able operational machining, [9] model the power consumed in the turning of brass and
aluminium, and [10] evaluates the effect of the time-controlled pulse on the roughness
of the surface for turning with Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL).
From this background, in the research a predictive model was obtained for the
Specific Energy Consumption (SEC) in the turning of a stainless steel AISI 316L,
based on ANN of the MLP type. For this purpose, it was necessary to investigate the
effect of the cut conditions that constituted the inputs of the network formed by a
hidden layer with 20 neurons and trained by the Levenberg-Marquardt backpropaga-
tion algorithm.

2 Materials and Methods

In this machining process it was considered to use a ceramic cutting tool RNGN
120700E004 JX1 without coating, 12.7 mm in diameter and 7.94 mm in thickness.
This selection is attributed to its novelty in the market and be designed to machine heat-
resistant alloys in addition to the interest generated in the evaluation of its behavior. In
the turning operation for which this tool is intended, a CNC lathe HAAS ST-10 with a
maximum capacity of 356  406 mm, 11.2 kW of power and 6000 rpm in the spindle,
that meets the characteristics of the work regime, was used according to the values of
cutting speed and feed rate (see Fig. 1), in addition to the necessary technical
parameters.
An experiment with 3 replicas (54 tests) based on dry and MQL turning operations
of a bar of 25 mm in diameter and 100 mm in length was developed, varying the
cutting speed in 3 levels (200 m/min, 300 m/min, 400 m/min), the feed rate in 3 levels
 Predictive Model for Specific Energy Consumption 53

Fig. 1. Experimental station.

(0.1 mm/rev, 0.15 mm/rev, 0.2 mm/rev) and a constant cutting depth of 0.5 mm. The
measurements of the force values are made every 0.003 s by the Kistler 9257B
dynamometer mounted on the clamping tool, which were then processed through a
5070 multichannel load amplifier connected to a PC, using a program for the data
acquisition made on LabVIEW.
In this cutting process, it is necessary to find the dependence between the cutting
forces and the parameters of the cutting regime as independent variables, through an
ANN that represents this functional relationship. The values of these variables allow
obtaining the power consumption of the machine-tools, which is determined by the
energy consumption of the spindle system. SEC represents the rate of energy consumed
when removing 1 cm3 of material and to obtain it, is necessary to calculate the cutting
powers and the material removal rate through the formulas in [11]:

1000  vc
N¼ ð1Þ
D
L
T¼ ð2Þ
N f
R R
Ec Pi ðtÞdt ðPc ðtÞ þ Pu ðN Þ þ Pad ðtÞÞdt
SEC ¼ ¼R ¼ 60  ð3Þ
V MRRðtÞdt asp  f  vc  T

where N denotes the spindle speed, vc the cutting speed and D the bar diameter in (1). T
is the experiment duration, L the bar length and f the feed rate in (2). Ec represents the
energy consumed by the spindle system, V the volume of material removed, Pi ðtÞ the
input power of the spindle system, MRRðtÞ the material removal rate, Pc ðtÞ the cutting
power of the machining process, Pu ðN Þ the idle power, Pad ðtÞ the additional load loss
of the spindle system, asp the depth of cut and t the machining time in (3). In (4), (5)
and (6) the functions Pc ðtÞ, Pu ðN Þ y Pad ðtÞ are determined by Fx ðtÞ; Fy ðtÞ and Fz ðtÞ as
54 D.-A. Curra-Sosa et al.

the values of directional cutting force that will be estimated by the neural network
designed.

vc qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
ffi v
c
Pc ðtÞ ¼ Fc ðtÞ  ¼ Fx2 ðtÞ þ Fy2 ðtÞ þ Fz2 ðtÞ  ð4Þ
60 60
Pu ðN Þ ¼ 1:573  N þ 98 ð5Þ

Pad ðtÞ ¼ 3  106  P2c ðtÞ þ 0:1939  Pc ðtÞ ð6Þ

From the experimental tests, by cutting an austenitic stainless steel that according to
the AISI-SAE standard is 316L and whose composition to be used as a biomedical
material is established by ASTM F138 standard, records of the parameters of the
cutting regime constituted by the values of cutting speed, feed rate and machining time
for each lubrication regime was generated in the period of time where the values of
cutting forces remain stable with the minimum presence of outliers (see Table 1).

Table 1. Parameters of cutting regime.

Lubrication regime Cutting speed (m/min) Feed rate (mm/rev) Machining time (msec)
MQL/Dry 200 0.1 4001 values
0.15 2701 values
0.2 1905 values
300 0.1 3000 values
0.15 2500 values
0.2 1900 values
400 0.1 1900 values
0.15 2000 values
0.2 2000 values

The software used for the processing was MatLab, due to its strengths as a high
level programming language with graphic capabilities and to be an interactive envi-
ronment in the design and exploration of computer models, specifically, those of
Machine Learning [12]. The records that are introduced to MatLab constitute tuples
formed by the 4 independent variables that represent the parameters of the cutting
regime and the 3 dependent variables for the directional cutting forces, as follows:
 
rl ; vc ; f ; t; Fx ; Fy ; Fz ð7Þ

where rl denotes the lubrication regime. In correspondence with the wide variety of
ANN applications, there are several architectures oriented to the modeling of particular
phenomena that require estimation, classification, clustering and forecasting among
others. In the case at hand, an MLP type network is used due to its potential in the
 Predictive Model for Specific Energy Consumption 55

adjustment of functions. For this, several designs were considered, according to the
features of Table 2 that determine their performance:

Table 2. Choices for the design of ANN.

Features Choices
Number of hidden layers 1 or 2 hidden layers
Number of neurons in the hidden layer(s) 10, 15 or 20 neurons
Transfer functions of neurons in hidden Sigmoid hyperbolic tangent, logarithmic
layer(s) sigmoid
Transfer functions of neurons in output Poslin, Purelin, Softmax
layer
Performance function Mean Squared Normalized Error, Mean absolute
error
Division of the sample for training, {0.6;0.2;0.2}, {0.7;0.2;0.1}, {0.7;0.15;0.15}
validation and testing
Selection of records for training, selection Random, organized
and testing
Training algorithm Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation, scaled
conjugated gradient

3 Results and Discussions

In the experimentation, most of the possible combinations were considered, as options

were discarded due to the poor performance they showed, from identifying in each of
these, the best of 10 neural networks obtained with the same initial conditions. It was
decided to use a network composed of an input layer with 4 neurons, a hidden layer
with 20 neurons and in the output layer 3 neurons as shown in Fig. 2. The transfer
functions in the neurons that showed the best results were the Tangent Sigmoid
Hyperbolic in the hidden layer and Purelin in the output layer. Although both per-
formance functions offer similar results, the Mean Squared Normalized Error is con-
sidered to be more sensitive to the presence of outliers that may appear in the force
values due to the work environment.
The 43 814 records distributed as shown in Table 1 were divided into the pro-
portion 60%, 20% and 20% for the training, validation and testing processes respec-
tively; having the lowest value of the approach error than the other two variants. With
this division, the random selection was discarded and the organized selection was
considered in which, for every 5 consecutive records, 3 of these randomly chosen are
taken for training, another one for validation and the last one for the test. With this
strategy the learning of the network was more effective. For training, was selected as a
supervised algorithm, the Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation due to a better per-
formance on its counterpart in terms of speed and adaptability.
From several workouts of the selected network architecture, Fig. 3 shows the level
of adjustment to the values of the Real Cutting Force (RCF) to the Estimated Cutting
Force (ECF) by means of the regression coefficient R, specifying a 99% accuracy. The
56 D.-A. Curra-Sosa et al.

Fig. 2. Multi-layer perceptron architecture.

smallest value obtained from the error function is approximately 47.5832 which means
that the deviation for the error made in the estimation of the cutting force values is
6.8981 which represents approximately 2% of the average value.

Fig. 3. Regression RCF vs ECF.

In addition to the proximity of the estimated values obtained by the ANN to the real
values (see Fig. 4), the trends of this machining operation are confirmed, where the
feed rate is decisive in the SEC through the inverse relationship that characterizes it and
 Predictive Model for Specific Energy Consumption 57

the slight increase in the values of SEC in the dry cut as shown in Table 3. At this point
it is important to emphasize the practical utility of these models in obtaining the
engineer’s technical notes, so that he/she has an instrument that will support him in the
decision-making process regarding the adequate work regime in order to optimize the
use of resources and technologies available in their work environment.

Fig. 4. Experimental values vs neural network values.

Table 3. Experimental SEC and estimated SEC.

Lubrication Cutting speed Feed rate Experimental SEC Estimated SEC
regime (m/min) (mm/rev) (J/cm3) (J/cm3)
MQL 200 0.1 32 124 ± 10.3469 32 126 ± 3.2371
0.15 22 163 ± 10.7764 22 162 ± 4.4847
0.2 17 434 ± 10.387 17 433 ± 2.5983
300 0.1 31 612 ± 10.9251 31 612 ± 2.6617
0.15 21 737 ± 8.0072 21 737 ± 1.4845
0.2 16 812 ± 11.0832 16 814 ± 2.9042
400 0.1 30 423 ± 22.1497 30 422 ± 9.0603
0.15 21 192 ± 15.2873 21 190 ± 8.5544
0.2 16 722 ± 8.699 16 723 ± 3.9225
Dry 200 0.1 32 976 ± 9.659 32 976 ± 1.5757
0.15 22 746 ± 11.2969 22 743 ± 4.765
0.2 17 991 ± 21.4675 17 993 ± 3.0655
300 0.1 32 097 ± 26.9352 32 100 ± 16.3696
0.15 22 346 ± 15.3537 22 344 ± 5.704
0.2 17 596 ± 17.1353 17 596 ± 3.0117
400 0.1 31 051 ± 89.1983 31 032 ± 48.8941
0.15 22 133 ± 21.6529 22 132 ± 6.6294
0.2 17 324 ± 15.1823 17 322 ± 7.4933
58 D.-A. Curra-Sosa et al.

4 Conclusions

The article described the instruments used in the experimentation as well as the
information obtained regarding the parameters of the cutting regime and the techno-
logical indexes of machining considered. The modeling in MatLab is based on the
supervised learning algorithms that it implements and among these, an MLP type ANN
is designed for the functional adjustment between the considered variables, where the
best configuration in terms of performance according to its features is evaluated. The
results obtained showed a high precision in the estimation of the cutting force, an
aspect that is evident in the values of performance indexes such as the mean square
error and the R-adjustment. This allowed obtaining the values of the SEC for each one
of the selection variants in the parameters of the cutting rate. Therefore, the predictive
model is adequate in terms of energy savings, which help to mitigate the negative
consequences caused by the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere.

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