The Effect of Microstructure on the Machinability of Natural Fiber Reinforced Plastic Composites: A Novel Explainable Machine Learning (XML) Approach

Natural fiber reinforced plastic (NFRP) composites are ecofriendly and biodegradable materials that offer tremendous ecological advantages while preserving unique structures and properties. Studies on using these natural fibers as alternatives to conventional synthetic fibers in fiber-reinforced materials have opened up possibilities for industrial applications, especially sustainable manufacturing. However, critical issues reside in the machinability of such materials because of their multi-scale structure and the randomness of the reinforcing elements distributed within the matrix basis. This paper reports a comprehensive investigation of the effect of microstructure heterogeneity on the resultant behaviors of cutting forces for NFRP machining. A convolutional neural network (CNN) links the microstructural reinforcing fibers and their impacts on changing the cutting forces (with an estimation accuracy of over 90%). Next, a model-agnostic explainable machine learning approach is implemented to decipher this CNN black-box model by discovering the underlying mechanisms of relating the reinforcing elements/fibers' microstructures. The presented XML approach extracts physical descriptors from the in-process monitoring microscopic images and finds the causality of the fibrous structures' heterogeneity to the resultant machining forces. The results suggest that, for the heterogeneous fibers, the tightly and evenly bounded fiber elements (i.e., with lower aspect ratio, lower eccentricity, and higher compactness ) strengthen the material and increase the cutting forces. Therefore, the presented explainable machine learning framework opens an opportunity to discover the causality of material microstructures on the resultant process dynamics and accurately predict the cutting behaviors during material removal processes.