Lamb wave damage severity estimation using ensemble-based machine learning method with separate model network

Lamb wave-based damage estimation have great potential for structural health monitoring. However, designing a generalizable model that predicts accurate and reliable damage quantification result is still a practice challenge due to complex behavior of waves with different damage severities. In the recent years, machine learning (ML) algorithms have been proven to be an efficient tool to analyze damage-modulated Lamb wave signals. In this study, ensemble-based ML algorithms are employed to develop a generalizable crack quantification model for thin metallic plates. For this, the scattering of Lamb wave signals due to different configuration of crack dimension and orientation is extensively studied. Various finite element simulations signals, representing distinct crack severities in term of crack length, penetration and orientation are acquired. Realizing that both temporal and spectral information of signal is extremely important to damage quantification, three time-frequency (TF) based damage sensitive indices namely energy concentration, TF flux and coefficient of energy variance are proposed. These damage features are extracted by employing smoothed-pseudo Wigner–Ville distribution. After that data augmentation technique based on the spline-based interpolation is applied to enhance the size of the dataset. Eventually, these fully developed damage dataset is deployed to train ensemble-based models. Here we propose separate model network, in which different models are trained and then link together to predict new and unseen datasets. The performance of the proposed model is demonstrated by two cases: first simulated data incorporated with high artificial noises are employed to test the model and in the second scenario, experimental data in raw form are used. Results indicate that the proposed model has the potential to develop a general model that yields reliable answer for crack quantification.