Convolutional Neural Network for Risk Assessment in Polycrystalline
Alloy Structures via Ultrasonic Testing
Abstract
In the current state of the art of process industries/manufacturing
technologies, computer-instrumented and computer-controlled autonomous
techniques are necessary for damage diagnosis and prognosis in operating
machinery. From this perspective, the paper addresses the issue of
fatigue damage that is one of the most commonly encountered sources of
degradation in polycrystalline-alloy structures of machinery components.
It is possible to conduct in-situ detection & classification of damage
as well as an assessment of the remaining service life through
ultrasonic measurements of material degradation and their computer-based
analysis. In this paper, tools of machine learning (e.g., convolutional
neural networks (CNNs)) are applied to synergistic combinations of
ultrasonic measurements and images from a confocal microscope (Alicona)
to detect and evaluate the risk of fatigue damage. The database of the
confocal microscope has been used to calibrate the ultrasonic database
and to provide the ground truth for fatigue damage assessment. The
results show that both the ultrasonic data and confocal microscope
images are capable of classifying the fatigue damage into their
respective classes with considerably high accuracy. However, the
ultrasonic CNN model yields better accuracy than the confocal microscope
CNN model by almost 9%.