Surface roughness of machined parts is a key attribute in determining product quality. It affects several functional attributes of parts such as fatigue life, contact surface friction, wear, contact stress distribution, and paintability. Due to the lack of a robust in-process roughness monitoring scheme in industry, it is difficult to control surface roughness based on in-process feedback. This paper presents an approach for monitoring of surface roughness using ultrasonic technique in end milling. The proposed system is utilized to measure reflected ultrasonic signal from the machined surface. The various ultrasonic parameters such as amplitude, root mean square, attenuation coefficient, reflection coefficient of the reflected echoes can be correlated with surface roughness of the workpiece. The experimental results show that the system is able to detect the changes in surface roughness and can be used as a monitoring system in mass production.
Surface roughness, end milling, ultrasonic technique, monitoring
