Can we quantify microstructure using forces measured during machining? - BW12

Description In the titanium manufacturing supply chain, particularly when supplying material for the aerospace industry, extensive and tedious materials testing is performed at intermediate stages of manufacture to assess the quality of the material before being sent for further downstream processing. These tests, such as chemical etching for grain size analysis, are extremely time and resource consuming, leading to only a few selected batches being selected for quality assessment. This work investigates the potential of measuring grain size in beta titanium alloys using the forces generated during machining, which if feasible could lead to a higher level of confidence in the quality of the final product as well as significant productivity improvements during manufacturing. A large amount of high quality machining force data has already been acquired using a high resolution dynamometer fitted to the machine tool head to collect the cutting force tangential to the rotation, FC, the force in the feed (radial) direction, FF, and the normal force in the longitudinal axis, FL. Your task is to develop Python or Matlab code to condition the force signals to see if there is sufficient information within the datasets to replicate the microstructure. A particular successful project would lead to automatic grain size measurement, leading to no requirement for any cut up analysis in the future.