Acoustic Emission-Based Diagnosis Using AlexNet: How Wave Propagation Effects Classification Performance

Composite materials are frequently used due to light weight and high stiffness. However, the use of composite materials is limited due to several micro-mechanical damage mechanisms, which are currently not well understood. Therefore, Acoustic Emission (AE) is frequently suggested for in-situ diagnosis of composite materials in Structural Health Monitoring. Elastic stress waves in the ultrasound regime are recorded using highly sensitive measurement equipment. Based on suitable analysis and interpretation of the waveform data, different micro-mechanical damage mechanisms such as delamination or fiber breakage can be distinguished. Frequently, data-driven approaches are suggested for classification of AE data. In literature, attenuation of AE due to wave propagation is currently the main limiting factor in AE-based diagnosis. In particular, AE is strongly attenuated in composite materials due to dispersion as dominant attenuation mechanism. Furthermore, depending on the source location, which is usually not known a-priori, different propagation paths are obtained in practice. Therefore, the effect of wave propagation on AE is important and can not be neglected to achieve reliable classification. However, the effect of different propagation paths on the classification performance is often not considered explicitly. Due to dependence of wave propagation behavior on waveform characteristics (e.g. frequency), it can be expected that the impact of wave propagation on AE classification performance depends also on the related source mechanism. Therefore, it is worth to study how classification performance of different source mechanisms is effected by wave propagation. In this paper, the dependence of the classification performance on different propagation distances is experimentally investigated in detail. To achieve highly reproducible AE measurements, different artificial AE sources are induced using surface mounted piezo elements. The corresponding waveforms are measured at two different locations. For classification, a convolutional neural network-based classification scheme is established. The pre-trained AlexNet architecture is fine-tuned using measurements obtained using different excitation signals. The classification performance is evaluated with particular focus on the impact of wave propagation. The variations in propagation distance have a strong impact on the classification performance. As main conclusion for AE-based SHM it can be stated that variations in the propagation path should be considered. Furthermore, the underlying source mechanisms should be taken into consideration for reliable performance estimation.