Adaptive control to actively damp bistabilities in highly interrupted turning processes using a hardware-in-the-loop simulator

Interruptions in turning make the process forces non-smooth and nonlinear. Smooth nonlinear cutting forces result in the process of being stable for small perturbations and unstable for larger ones. Re-entry after interruptions acts as perturbations making the process exhibit bistabilities. Stability for such processes is characterized by Hopf bifurcations resulting in lobes and period-doubling bifurcations resulting in narrow unstable lenses. Interrupted turning remains an important technological problem, and since experimentation to investigate and mitigate instabilities are difficult, this paper instead emulates these phenomena on a controlled hardware-in-the-loop simulator. Emulated cutting on the simulator confirms that bistabilities persist with lobes and lenses. Cutting in bistable regimes should be avoided due to conditional stability. Hence, we demonstrate the use of active damping to stabilize cutting with interruptions/perturbations. To stabilize cutting with small/large perturbations, we successfully implement an adaptive gain tuning scheme that adapts the gain to the level of interruption/perturbation. To facilitate real-time detection of instabilities and their control, we characterize the efficacy of the updating scheme for its dependence on the time required to update the gain and for its dependence on the levels of gain increments. We observe that higher gain increments with shorter updating times result in the process being stabilized quicker. Such results are instructive for active damping of real processes exhibiting conditional instabilities prone to perturbations.