Automated Damage Detection of (C/C)/Si/SiC Composite Using Vibration Modes with Deep Neural Networks

Discontinuous carbon fiber-carbon matrix composites dispersed Si/SiC matrix composites have complicated microstructures that consist of four phases (C/C, Si, SiC, and C/SiC). The crack stability significantly depends on their geometrical arrangement. Nondestructive evaluation is needed to maintain the components in their safe condition. Although several nondestructive evaluation methods such as the Eddy current have been developed, any set of them is still inadequate in order to cover all of the scales and aspects that (C/C)/Si/SiC composites comprise. We propose a new method for nondestructive evaluation using vibration/resonance modes and deep learning. The assumed resolution is mm-order (approx. 1–10 mm), which laser vibrometers are generally capable of handling sufficiently. We utilize deep neural networks called convolutional auto-encoders for inferring damaged areas from vibration modes, which is a so-called inverse problem and infeasible to solve numerically in most cases. We solve this inference problem by training convolutional auto-encoders using vibration modes obtained from a non-damaged specimen with various frequencies as the dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed method successfully detects the damaged areas of validation specimens. One of the noteworthy points of this method is that we need only a few specimens for training deep neural networks, which generally require a large amount of data.