Monitoring Crack Propagation using Data-Driven Causal Discovery and
Supervised Learning
Abstract
Mechanical wave transmission through a material is influenced by the
mechanical discontinuity in the material. The propagation of embedded
discontinuities can be monitored by analyzing the wave-transmission
measurements recorded by a multipoint sensor system placed on the
surface of the material. In our study, robust monitoring of the
propagation of a mechanical discontinuity is achieved by using
supervised learning followed by data-driven causal discovery to process
the multipoint waveform measurements resulting from a single impulse
source. The new data-driven causal-discovery workflow jointly processes
the nine 25-µs waveforms measured by the multipoint sensor system
comprising 9 sensors. The proposed workflow can monitor the propagation
of mechanical discontinuity through three stages, namely initial,
intermediate, and final stages. The workflow considers the wave
attenuation, dispersion and multiple wave-propagation modes. Among
various feature reduction techniques ranging from decomposition methods
to manifold approximation methods, the features derived based on
statistical parameterizations of the measured waveforms lead to reliable
monitoring that is robust to changes in precision, resolution, and
signal-to-noise ratio of the multipoint sensor measurements. Causal
signatures have been successfully identified in the multipoint waveform
measurements. The numbers of zero-crossing, negative-turning, and
positive in the waveforms are the strongest causal signatures of crack
propagation. Higher order moments of the waveforms, such as variance,
skewness and kurtosis, are also strong causal signatures of crack
propagation. The newly discovered causal signatures confirm that the
statistical correlations and conventional feature rankings are not
always statistically significant indicators of causality.