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The problem of cutting process monitoring has been investigated in recent years, with encouraging results, using pattern recognition analysis of acoustic emission (AE) signals. The analyses are based on linear discriminant functions, which assume that the observed data (from each class) are independent random samples from multivariate normal distributions with equal covariance matrices. However, in a number of practical situations some (or all) of these assumptions may not necessarily hold, resulting in errors in the analysis. In this paper, the distributions of AE spectra generated in earlier work are first analysed, and the results indicate departure from the assumptions, although the lack of normality was not too severe. Relaxing the assumption of equality of the covariance matrices, quadratic discriminant function analysis produced improved results for tool wear and chip noise monitoring while degrading tool fracture detection. The latter is due to inadequacy of the amount of data used in training the system. It is expected that increasing the data base would improve the results for all classes. The analysis until now has focused on reducing the dimensionality of the feature space by eliminating the features with the least discriminatory power. Even though this inevitably reduces the performance of the system, it is a necessary compromise for increased computational speed. To make use of the entire feature set with a reduced matrix rank, a principal component analysis is investigated. The result is a substantial improvement in correct classification of AE signals, even under different cuting conditions.

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