Experimental Investigation of Surface Roughness in Milling of Duralcan^TM Composite

In today's developing aircraft and automotive industry, extremely durable and wear-resistant materials, especially in high temperatures, are applied. Due to this practical approach, conventional materials have been superseded by composite materials. In recent years, the application of metal matrix composites has become evident in industry 4.0. A study has been performed to analyze the surface roughness of aluminum matrix composites named Duralcan^® during end milling. Two roughness surface parameters have been selected: arithmetical mean roughness value Ra and mean roughness depth Rz regarding the variable cutting speed. Due to the classification of aluminum matrix composites as hard-to-cut materials concerning excessive tool wear, this paper describes the possibility of surface roughness prediction using machine learning algorithms. In order to find the best algorithm, Classification and Regression Tree (CART) and pattern recognition models based on artificial neural networks (ANN) have been compared. By following the obtained models, the experiment shows the effectiveness of roughness prediction based on verification models. Based on experimental research, the authors obtained the coefficient R² for the CART model 0.91 and the mean square error for the model ANN 0.11.