PARAMETRIC ANALYSIS OF A GRINDING PROCESS USING THE ROUGH SETS THEORY

With continuous automation of the manufacturing industries and the development of advanced data acquisition systems, a huge volume of manufacturing-related data is now available which can be effectively mined to extract valuable knowledge and unfold the hidden patterns. In this paper, a data mining tool, in the form of the rough sets theory, is applied to a grinding process to investigate the effects of its various input parameters on the responses. Rotational speed of the grinding wheel, depth of cut and type of the cutting fluid are grinding parameters, and average surface roughness, amplitude of vibration and grinding ratio are the responses. The best parametric settings of the grinding parameters are also derived to control the quality characteristics of the ground components. The developed decision rules are quite easy to understand and can truly predict the response values at varying combinations of the considered grinding parameters

A Data Mining Approach for Analysis of a Wire Electrical Discharge Machining Process

Wire electrical discharge machining (WEDM) is a non-conventional material-removal process where a continuously travelling electrically conductive wire is used as an electrode to erode material from a workpiece. To explore its fullest machining potential, there is always a requirement to examine the effects of its varied input parameters on the responses and resolve the best parametric setting. This paper proposes parametric analysis of a WEDM process by applying non-parametric decision tree algorithm, based on a past experimental dataset. Two decision tree-based classification methods, i.e. classification and regression tree (CART) and Chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) are considered here as the data mining tools to examine the influences of six WEDM process parameters on four responses, and identify the most preferred parametric mix to help in achieving the desired response values. The developed decision trees recognize pulse-on time as the most indicative WEDM process parameter impacting almost all the responses. Furthermore, a comparative analysis on the classification performance of CART and CHAID algorithms demonstrates the superiority of CART with higher overall classification accuracy and lower prediction risk