A novel aging state recognition method of a viscoelastic sandwich structure based on permutation entropy of dual-tree complex wavelet packet transform and generalized Chebyshev support vector machine

A viscoelastic sandwich structure is widely used in mechanical equipment, but therein viscoelastic layers inevitably suffer from aging which changes the dynamic characteristics of the structure and influences the whole performance of the equipment. Hence, accurate and automatic aging state recognition of the viscoelastic sandwich structure is very significant to monitor structural health state and guarantee equipment operating reliably. To fulfill this task, by analyzing the sensor-based vibration response signals, a novel aging state recognition approach of the viscoelastic sandwich structure based on permutation entropy of dual-tree complex wavelet packet transform and generalized Chebyshev support vector machine is proposed in this article. To extract effective aging feature information, the measured nonlinear and non-stationary vibration response signals are processed by dual-tree complex wavelet packet transform, and multiple permutation entropy features are extracted from the frequency-band signals to reflect structural aging states. For accurate and automatic aging state classification, generalized Chebyshev kernel is introduced, and multi-class generalized Chebyshev support vector machine is developed to classify structural aging states. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a typical viscoelastic sandwich structure is designed and fabricated, and various structural aging states are created through the hot oxygen–accelerated aging of viscoelastic layers. The testing results show that the proposed method can recognize the different structural aging states accurately and automatically. In addition, the superiority of dual-tree complex wavelet packet transform in processing vibration response signals and the performance of generalized Chebyshev support vector machine in classifying structural aging states are respectively validated by comparing with the commonly used methods.