The impact of process variables and wear characteristics on the cutting tool performance using Finite Element Analysis

The frequent failure of cutting tool in the cutting process may cause a huge loss of money and time especially for hard to machine materials such as titanium alloys. Thus this study is mainly focused on the impact of wear characteristics and process variables on the cutting tool which is ignored by most of researchers. A thermo-mechanical finite element model of orthogonal metal cutting with segment chip formation is presented. This model can be used to predict the process performance in the form of cutting force, temperature distribution and stress distribution as a function of process parameters. Ls-dyna is adopted as the finite element package due to its ability in solving dynamic problems. Ti-6Al-4V is the workpiece material due to its excellent physical property and very hard to machine. This thesis uses the Johnson-Cook constitutive model to represent the flow stress of workpiece material and the Johnson-Cook damage model to simulate the failure of the workpiece elements. The impacts of process variables and tool wear are investigated through changing the value of the variables and tool geometry. It is found that flank wear length has a linear relationship with the cutting force which is useful for predicting the cutting tool performance. Increasing the crater wear will in some degree diminishes the cutting force and temperature. A chip breakage will also happen in some cases of crater wear. Through these findings, the relationship between flank wear and cutting power is established which can be used as the guidance in the workshop for changing the tools. The distribution of temperature and stress on the cutting tool in different cutting conditions can be adopted to predict the most possible position forming cutting tool wear

Efficiently Disassemble-and-Pack for Mechanism

In this paper, we present a disassemble-and-pack approach for a mechanism to seek a box which contains total mechanical parts with high space utilization. Its key feature is that mechanism contains not only geometric shapes but also internal motion structures which can be calculated to adjust geometric shapes of the mechanical parts. Our system consists of two steps: disassemble mechanical object into a group set and pack them within a box efficiently. The first step is to create a hierarchy of possible group set of parts which is generated by disconnecting the selected joints and adjust motion structures of parts in groups. The aim of this step is seeking total minimum volume of each group. The second step is to exploit the hierarchy based on breadth-first-search to obtain a group set. Every group in the set is inserted into specified box from maximum volume to minimum based on our packing strategy. Until an approximated result with satisfied efficiency is accepted, our approach finish exploiting the hierarchy.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figure

Context-Aware Block Net for Small Object Detection.

State-of-the-art object detectors usually progressively downsample the input image until it is represented by small feature maps, which loses the spatial information and compromises the representation of small objects. In this article, we propose a context-aware block net (CAB Net) to improve small object detection by building high-resolution and strong semantic feature maps. To internally enhance the representation capacity of feature maps with high spatial resolution, we delicately design the context-aware block (CAB). CAB exploits pyramidal dilated convolutions to incorporate multilevel contextual information without losing the original resolution of feature maps. Then, we assemble CAB to the end of the truncated backbone network (e.g., VGG16) with a relatively small downsampling factor (e.g., 8) and cast off all following layers. CAB Net can capture both basic visual patterns as well as semantical information of small objects, thus improving the performance of small object detection. Experiments conducted on the benchmark Tsinghua-Tencent 100K and the Airport dataset show that CAB Net outperforms other top-performing detectors by a large margin while keeping real-time speed, which demonstrates the effectiveness of CAB Net for small object detection

Decision Fusion Network with Perception Fine-tuning for Defect Classification

Surface defect inspection is an important task in industrial inspection. Deep learning-based methods have demonstrated promising performance in this domain. Nevertheless, these methods still suffer from misjudgment when encountering challenges such as low-contrast defects and complex backgrounds. To overcome these issues, we present a decision fusion network (DFNet) that incorporates the semantic decision with the feature decision to strengthen the decision ability of the network. In particular, we introduce a decision fusion module (DFM) that extracts a semantic vector from the semantic decision branch and a feature vector for the feature decision branch and fuses them to make the final classification decision. In addition, we propose a perception fine-tuning module (PFM) that fine-tunes the foreground and background during the segmentation stage. PFM generates the semantic and feature outputs that are sent to the classification decision stage. Furthermore, we present an inner-outer separation weight matrix to address the impact of label edge uncertainty during segmentation supervision. Our experimental results on the publicly available datasets including KolektorSDD2 (96.1% AP) and Magnetic-tile-defect-datasets (94.6% mAP) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method

CINFormer: Transformer network with multi-stage CNN feature injection for surface defect segmentation

Surface defect inspection is of great importance for industrial manufacture and production. Though defect inspection methods based on deep learning have made significant progress, there are still some challenges for these methods, such as indistinguishable weak defects and defect-like interference in the background. To address these issues, we propose a transformer network with multi-stage CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) feature injection for surface defect segmentation, which is a UNet-like structure named CINFormer. CINFormer presents a simple yet effective feature integration mechanism that injects the multi-level CNN features of the input image into different stages of the transformer network in the encoder. This can maintain the merit of CNN capturing detailed features and that of transformer depressing noises in the background, which facilitates accurate defect detection. In addition, CINFormer presents a Top-K self-attention module to focus on tokens with more important information about the defects, so as to further reduce the impact of the redundant background. Extensive experiments conducted on the surface defect datasets DAGM 2007, Magnetic tile, and NEU show that the proposed CINFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance in defect detection