A prediction model of milling force for aviation 7050 aluminum alloy based on improved RBF neural network

Semi-finishing is an important step to reduce the cutting vibration and deformation caused by the thin-walled stiffening rib parts of aeronautical inertial control products during the finishing process. In the semi-finishing process, the variation of cutting force is a key factor of machining deformation. A large number of samples considering the effect of cutting parameters, such as spindle speed, feed per tooth, and milling width were simulated by the finite element simulation software AdvantEdge to obtain the milling forces based on 7050 aluminum alloy (Al7050) for aviation. Moreover, the standardized Euclidean distance was introduced to the radial basis neural network model (RBF-NN) to develop an improved RBF neural network model (IRBF-NN), and a high-precision model to predict the effect of cutting parameters on the thin-walled semi-finishing milling forces was established based on the proposed IRBF-NN. Results show that the maximum relative errors of milling force obtained by the genetic algorithm–optimized BP neural network model (GA-BP-NN), RBF-NN, and IRBF-NN are 13.9%, 12.5%, and 4.1%, respectively. Accordingly, the proposed IRBF-NN has high accuracy and effectiveness to predict milling force for the semi-finishing of aerospace Al7050 thin-walled stiffening rib parts.