Prediction of the surface quality of friction stir welds by the analysis of process data using Artificial Neural Networks

Author(s):  
R Hartl ◽  
B Praehofer ◽  
MF Zaeh

Friction stir welding is an advanced joining technology that is particularly suitable for aluminum alloys. Various studies have shown that welding quality depends significantly on the welding speed and the rotational speed of the tool. It is frequently possible to detect an unsuitable setting of these parameters by examining the resulting surface defects, such as increased flash formation or surface galling. In this work, Artificial Neural Networks were used to analyze process data in friction stir welding and predict the resulting quality of the weld surface. For this purpose, nine different variables were recorded during friction stir welding of EN AW-6082 T6 sheets: the forces and accelerations in three spatial directions, the spindle torque, and temperatures at the tool shoulder and tool probe. In Case 1, the welds were assigned to the classes good and defective on the basis of a human visual inspection of the weld surface. In Case 2, the welds were categorized into the two classes on the basis of a surface topography analysis. Subsequently, three different major Artificial Neural Network architectures were tested for their ability to predict the surface quality: Feed Forward Fully Connected Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks. The highest classification accuracy was achieved when Convolutional Neural Networks were used. Thus, the evaluation of the force signal transverse to the welding direction yielded the highest accuracy of 99.1% for the prediction of the result of the human visual inspection. The result achieved for the prediction of the topography analysis was an accuracy of 87.4% when the spindle torque was evaluated. Using all nine different process variables to predict the topography analysis, the accuracy could be improved slightly to 88.0%. The sampling rate of the spindle torque was varied between 40 Hz and 9600 Hz and no significant influence was determined. The findings show that Convolutional Neural Networks are well suited for the interpretation of friction stir welding process data and can be used to predict the resulting surface quality. In future work, the results are to be used to develop a parameter optimization method for friction stir welding.

Metals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 535
Author(s):  
Roman Hartl ◽  
Andreas Bachmann ◽  
Jan Bernd Habedank ◽  
Thomas Semm ◽  
Michael F. Zaeh

Preliminary studies have shown the superiority of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) compared to other network architectures for determining the surface quality of friction stir welds. In this paper, CNNs were employed to detect cavities inside friction stir welds by evaluating inline measured process data. The aim was to determine whether CNNs are suitable for identifying surface defects exclusively, or if the approach is transferable to internal weld defects. For this purpose, 120 welds were produced and examined by ultrasonic testing, which was the basis for labeling the data as “good” or “defective.” Different types of artificial neural network were tested for predicting the placement of the welds into the defined classes. It was found that the way of labeling the data is significant for the accuracy achievable. When the complete welds were uniformly labeled as “good” or “defective,” an accuracy of 98.5% was achieved by a CNN, which was a significant improvement compared to the state of the art. When the welds were labeled segment-wise, an accuracy of 79.2% was obtained by using a CNN, showing that a segment-wise prediction of the cavities is also possible. The results confirm that CNNs are well suited for process monitoring in friction stir welding and their application enables the identification of various defect types.


Author(s):  
Bhargavi Munnaluri ◽  
K. Ganesh Reddy

Wind forecasting is one of the best efficient ways to deal with the challenges of wind power generation. Due to the depletion of fossil fuels renewable energy sources plays a major role for the generation of power. For future management and for future utilization of power, we need to predict the wind speed.  In this paper, an efficient hybrid forecasting approach with the combination of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Networks(ANN) are proposed to improve the quality of prediction of wind speed. Due to the different parameters of wind, it is difficult to find the accurate prediction value of the wind speed. The proposed hybrid model of forecasting is examined by taking the hourly wind speed of past years data by reducing the prediction error with the help of Mean Square Error by 0.019. The result obtained from the Artificial Neural Networks improves the forecasting quality.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chem Int

Recently, process control in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is, mostly accomplished through examining the quality of the water effluent and adjusting the processes through the operator’s experience. This practice is inefficient, costly and slow in control response. A better control of WTPs can be achieved by developing a robust mathematical tool for performance prediction. Due to their high accuracy and quite promising application in the field of engineering, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are attracting attention in the domain of WWTP predictive performance modeling. This work focuses on applying ANN with a feed-forward, back propagation learning paradigm to predict the effluent water quality of the Habesha brewery WTP. Data of influent and effluent water quality covering approximately an 11-month period (May 2016 to March 2017) were used to develop, calibrate and validate the models. The study proves that ANN can predict the effluent water quality parameters with a correlation coefficient (R) between the observed and predicted output values reaching up to 0.969. Model architecture of 3-21-3 for pH and TN, and 1-76-1 for COD were selected as optimum topologies for predicting the Habesha Brewery WTP performance. The linear correlation between predicted and target outputs for the optimal model architectures described above were 0.9201 and 0.9692, respectively.


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