The practical application of structural health monitoring (SHM) is often limited by the availability of labelled data. Transfer learning - specifically in the form of domain adaptation (DA) - gives rise to the possibility of leveraging information from a population of physical or numerical structures, by inferring a mapping that aligns the feature spaces. Typical DA methods rely on nonparametric distance metrics, which require sufficient data to perform density estimation. In addition, these methods can be prone to performance degradation under class imbalance. To address these issues, statistic alignment (SA) is discussed, with a demonstration of how these methods can be made robust to class imbalance, including a special case of class imbalance called a partial DA scenario. SA is demonstrated to facilitate damage localisation with no target labels in a numerical case study, outperforming other state-of-the-art DA methods. It is then shown to be capable of aligning the feature spaces of a real heterogeneous population, the Z24 and KW51 bridges, with only 220 samples used from the KW51 bridge. Finally, in scenarios where more complex mappings are required for knowledge transfer, SA is shown to be a vital pre-processing tool, increasing the performance of established DA methods.
With the introduction of damage tolerance-based design philosophies, the demand for reliable and robust structural health monitoring (SHM) procedures for aerospace composite structures is increasing rapidly. The performance of supervised learning algorithms for SHM depends on the amount of labeled and balanced datasets. Apart from this, collecting datasets accommodating all possible damage scenarios is cumbersome, costly, and inaccessible for aerospace applications. In this paper, we have proposed two different unsupervised-feature learning approaches where the algorithms are trained only on the baseline scenarios to learn the distribution of baseline signals. The trained unsupervised feature learner is used for delamination prediction with an anomaly detection philosophy. In the first approach, we have combined dimensionality reduction techniques (principal component analysis and independent component analysis) with a one-class support vector machine. In another approach, we have utilized deep learning-based deep convolutional autoencoders (CAE). These state-of-the-art algorithms are applied on three different guided wave-based experimental datasets. The raw guided wave signals present in the datasets are converted into wavelet-enhanced higher-order representations for training unsupervised feature-learning algorithms. We have also compared different techniques, and it is seen that CAE generates better reconstructions with lower mean squared error and can provide higher accuracy on all the datasets.
The use of Machine Learning (ML) has rapidly spread across several fields, having encountered many applications in Structural Dynamics and Vibroacoustic (SD\&V). The increasing capabilities of ML to unveil insights from data, driven by unprecedented data availability, algorithms advances and computational power, enhance decision making, uncertainty handling, patterns recognition and real-time assessments. Three main applications in SD\&V have taken advantage of these benefits. In Structural Health Monitoring, ML detection and prognosis lead to safe operation and optimized maintenance schedules. System identification and control design are leveraged by ML techniques in Active Noise Control and Active Vibration Control. Finally, the so-called ML-based surrogate models provide fast alternatives to costly simulations, enabling robust and optimized product design. Despite the many works in the area, they have not been reviewed and analyzed. Therefore, to keep track and understand this ongoing integration of fields, this paper presents a survey of ML applications in SD\&V analyses, shedding light on the current state of implementation and emerging opportunities. The main methodologies, advantages, limitations, and recommendations based on scientific knowledge were identified for each of the three applications. Moreover, the paper considers the role of Digital Twins and Physics Guided ML to overcome current challenges and power future research progress. As a result, the survey provides a broad overview of the present landscape of ML applied in SD\&V and guides the reader to an advanced understanding of progress and prospects in the field.
Data loss in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) networks has recently become one of the main challenges for engineers. Therefore, a data recovery method for SHM, generally an expensive procedure, is essential. Lately, some techniques offered to recover this valuable raw data using Neural Network (NN) algorithms. Among them, the convolutional neural network (CNN) based on convolution, a mathematical operation, can be applied to non-image datasets such as signals to extract important features without human supervision. However, the effect of different parameters has not been studied and optimized for SHM applications. Therefore, this paper aims to propose different architectures and investigate the effects of different hyperparameters for one of the newest proposed methods, which is based on a CNN algorithm for the Alamosa Canyon Bridge as a real structure. For this purpose, three different CNN models were considered to predict one and two malfunctioned sensors by finding the correlation between other sensors, respectively. Then the CNN algorithm was trained by experimental data, and the results showed that the method had a reliable performance in predicting Alamosa Canyon Bridge's missed data. The accuracy of the model was increased by adding a convolutional layer. Also, a standard neural network with two hidden layers was trained with the same inputs and outputs of the CNN models. Based on the results, the CNN model had higher accuracy, lower computational cost, and was faster than the standard neural network.
Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been an active research area for the last three decades, and has accumulated a number of critical advances over that period, as can be seen in the literature. However, SHM is still facing challenges because of the paucity of damage-state data, operational and environmental fluctuations, repeatability issues, and changes in boundary conditions. These issues present as inconsistencies in the captured features and can have a huge impact on the practical implementation, but more critically, on the generalisation of the technology. Population-based SHM has been designed to address some of these concerns by modelling and transferring missing information using data collected from groups of similar structures. In this work, vibration data were collected from four healthy, nominally-identical, full-scale composite helicopter blades. Manufacturing differences (e.g., slight differences in geometry and/or material properties), among the blades presented as variability in their structural dynamics, which can be very problematic for SHM based on machine learning from vibration data. This work aims to address this variability by defining a general model for the frequency response functions of the blades, called a form, using mixtures of Gaussian processes.
Modern real-time Structural Health Monitoring systems can generate a considerable amount of information that must be processed and evaluated for detecting early anomalies and generating prompt warnings and alarms about the civil infrastructure conditions. The current cloud-based solutions cannot scale if the raw data has to be collected from thousands of buildings. This paper presents a full-stack deployment of an efficient and scalable anomaly detection pipeline for SHM systems which does not require sending raw data to the cloud but relies on edge computation. First, we benchmark three algorithmic approaches of anomaly detection, i.e., Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fully-Connected AutoEncoder (FC-AE), and Convolutional AutoEncoder (C-AE). Then, we deploy them on an edge-sensor, the STM32L4, with limited computing capabilities. Our approach decreases network traffic by $\approx8\cdot10^5\times$ , from 780KB/hour to less than 10 Bytes/hour for a single installation and minimize network and cloud resource utilization, enabling the scaling of the monitoring infrastructure. A real-life case study, a highway bridge in Italy, demonstrates that combining near-sensor computation of anomaly detection algorithms, smart pre-processing, and low-power wide-area network protocols (LPWAN) we can greatly reduce data communication and cloud computing costs, while anomaly detection accuracy is not adversely affected.
Attempts have been made recently in the field of population-based structural health monitoring (PBSHM), to transfer knowledge between SHM models of different structures. The attempts have been focussed on homogeneous and heterogeneous populations. A more general approach to transferring knowledge between structures, is by considering all plausible structures as points on a multidimensional base manifold and building a fibre bundle. The idea is quite powerful, since, a mapping between points in the base manifold and their fibres, the potential states of any arbitrary structure, can be learnt. A smaller scale problem, but still useful, is that of learning a specific point of every fibre, i.e. that corresponding to the undamaged state of structures within a population. Under the framework of PBSHM, a data-driven approach to the aforementioned problem is developed. Structures are converted into graphs and inference is attempted within a population, using a graph neural network (GNN) algorithm. The algorithm solves a major problem existing in such applications. Structures comprise different sizes and are defined as abstract objects, thus attempting to perform inference within a heterogeneous population is not trivial. The proposed approach is tested in a simulated population of trusses. The goal of the application is to predict the first natural frequency of trusses of different sizes, across different environmental temperatures and having different bar member types. After training the GNN using part of the total population, it was tested on trusses that were not included in the training dataset. Results show that the accuracy of the regression is satisfactory even in structures with higher number of nodes and members than those used to train it.
A powerful approach, and one of the most common ones in structural health monitoring (SHM), is to use data-driven models to make predictions and inferences about structures and their condition. Such methods almost exclusively rely on the quality of the data. Within the SHM discipline, data do not always suffice to build models with satisfactory accuracy for given tasks. Even worse, data may be completely missing from one's dataset, regarding the behaviour of a structure under different environmental conditions. In the current work, with a view to confronting such issues, the generation of artificial data using a variation of the generative adversarial network (GAN) algorithm, is used. The aforementioned variation is that of the conditional GAN or cGAN. The algorithm is not only used to generate artificial data, but also to learn transformations of manifolds according to some known parameters. Assuming that the structure's response is represented by points in a manifold, part of the space will be formed due to variations in external conditions affecting the structure. This idea proves efficient in SHM, as it is exploited to generate structural data for specific values of environmental coefficients. The scheme is applied here on a simulated structure which operates under different temperature and humidity conditions. The cGAN is trained on data for some discrete values of the temperature within some range, and is able to generate data for every temperature in this range with satisfactory accuracy. The novelty, compared to classic regression in similar problems, is that the cGAN allows unknown environmental parameters to affect the structure and can generate whole manifolds of data for every value of the known parameters, while the unknown ones vary within the generated manifolds.
In the current work, a problem-splitting approach and a scheme motivated by transfer learning is applied to a structural health monitoring problem. The specific problem in this case is that of localising damage on an aircraft wing. The original experiment is described, together with the initial approach, in which a neural network was trained to localise damage. The results were not ideal, partly because of a scarcity of training data, and partly because of the difficulty in resolving two of the damage cases. In the current paper, the problem is split into two sub-problems and an increase in classification accuracy is obtained. The sub-problems are obtained by separating out the most difficult-to-classify damage cases. A second approach to the problem is considered by adopting ideas from transfer learning (usually applied in much deeper) networks to see if a network trained on the simpler damage cases can help with feature extraction in the more difficult cases. The transfer of a fixed trained batch of layers between the networks is found to improve classification by making the classes more separable in the feature space and to speed up convergence.
As Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) being implemented more over the years, the use of operational modal analysis of civil structures has become more significant for the assessment and evaluation of engineering structures. Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms have been in use for structural damage diagnostics of civil structures in the last couple of decades. While collecting vibration data from civil structures is a challenging and expensive task for both undamaged and damaged cases, in this paper, the authors are introducing Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) that is built on the Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) and using Wasserstein Distance for generating artificial labelled data to be used for structural damage diagnostic purposes. The authors named the developed model 1D W-DCGAN and successfully generated vibration data which is very similar to the input. The methodology presented in this paper will pave the way for vibration data generation for numerous future applications in the SHM domain.
The recent advances in the data science field in the last few decades have benefitted many other fields including Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). Particularly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) methods for vibration-based damage diagnostics of civil structures has been utilized extensively due to the observed high performances in learning from data. Along with diagnostics, damage prognostics is also vitally important for estimating the remaining useful life of civil structures. Currently, AI-based data-driven methods used for damage diagnostics and prognostics centered on historical data of the structures and require a substantial amount of data for prediction models. Although some of these methods are generative-based models, they are used to perform ML or DL tasks such as classification, regression, clustering, etc. after learning the distribution of the data. In this study, a variant of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), Cycle-Consistent Wasserstein Deep Convolutional GAN with Gradient Penalty (CycleWDCGAN-GP) model is developed to investigate the "transition of structural dynamic signature from an undamaged-to-damaged state" and "if this transition can be employed for predictive damage detection". The outcomes of this study demonstrate that the proposed model can accurately generate damaged responses from undamaged responses or vice versa. In other words, it will be possible to understand the damaged condition while the structure is still in a healthy (undamaged) condition or vice versa with the proposed methodology. This will enable a more proactive approach in overseeing the life-cycle performance as well as in predicting the remaining useful life of structures.
Surface cracks are a very common indicator of potential structural faults. Their early detection and monitoring is an important factor in structural health monitoring. Left untreated, they can grow in size over time and require expensive repairs or maintenance. With recent advances in computer vision and deep learning algorithms, the automatic detection and segmentation of cracks for this monitoring process have become a major topic of interest. This review aims to give researchers an overview of the published work within the field of crack analysis algorithms that make use of deep learning. It outlines the various tasks that are solved through applying computer vision algorithms to surface cracks in a structural health monitoring setting and also provides in-depth reviews of recent fully, semi and unsupervised approaches that perform crack classification, detection, segmentation and quantification. Additionally, this review also highlights popular datasets used for cracks and the metrics that are used to evaluate the performance of those algorithms. Finally, potential research gaps are outlined and further research directions are provided.
Modern-day civil, mechanical, and aeronautical structures are transitioning towards a continuous, online, and automated maintenance paradigm in order to ensure increased safety and reliability. The field of structural health monitoring (SHM) is playing a key role in this respect and active sensing acousto-ultrasound guided-wave based SHM techniques have shown great promise due to their potential sensitivity to small changes in the structure. However, the methods' robustness and diagnosis capability become limited in the presence of environmental and operational variability such as changing temperature. In order to circumvent this difficulty, in this paper, a novel stochastic time series-based framework was adopted to model guided wave propagation under varying temperatures. Different stochastic time-varying time series models, such as Recursive Maximum Likelihood Time-varying Auto-Regressive (RML-TAR) and Recursive Maximum Likelihood Time-varying Auto-Regressive with Exogenous Excitation (RML-TARX) models are put forward to model and capture the underlying dynamics of guided wave propagation under varying temperatures. The steps and facets of the identification procedure are presented and clearly explained. Then the identified models are used to perform one-step-ahead prediction as well as "simulation" of the guided wave signals. In order to gain insight from a physics perspective, high-fidelity finite element (FE) models were also established to model the effect of temperature variation on guided wave propagation. Finally, surrogate models are formulated through the use of stochastic time-dependent RML-TARX models and compared with the FE models under varying temperatures.
Classification models are a fundamental component of physical-asset management technologies such as structural health monitoring (SHM) systems and digital twins. Previous work introduced risk-based active learning, an online approach for the development of statistical classifiers that takes into account the decision-support context in which they are applied. Decision-making is considered by preferentially querying data labels according to expected value of perfect information (EVPI). Although several benefits are gained by adopting a risk-based active learning approach, including improved decision-making performance, the algorithms suffer from issues relating to sampling bias as a result of the guided querying process. This sampling bias ultimately manifests as a decline in decision-making performance during the later stages of active learning, which in turn corresponds to lost resource/utility. The current paper proposes two novel approaches to counteract the effects of sampling bias: semi-supervised learning, and discriminative classification models. These approaches are first visualised using a synthetic dataset, then subsequently applied to an experimental case study, specifically, the Z24 Bridge dataset. The semi-supervised learning approach is shown to have variable performance; with robustness to sampling bias dependent on the suitability of the generative distributions selected for the model with respect to each dataset. In contrast, the discriminative classifiers are shown to have excellent robustness to the effects of sampling bias. Moreover, it was found that the number of inspections made during a monitoring campaign, and therefore resource expenditure, could be reduced with the careful selection of the statistical classifiers used within a decision-supporting monitoring system.
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has been continuously benefiting from the advancements in the field of data science. Various types of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods have been utilized for the assessment and evaluation of civil structures. In AI, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms require plenty of datasets to train; particularly, the more data DL models are trained with, the better output it yields. Yet, in SHM applications, collecting data from civil structures through sensors is expensive and obtaining useful data (damage associated data) is challenging. In this paper, 1-D Wasserstein loss Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks using Gradient Penalty (1-D WDCGAN-GP) is utilized to generate damage associated vibration datasets that are similar to the input. For the purpose of vibration-based damage diagnostics, a 1-D Deep Convolutional Neural Network (1-D DCNN) is built, trained, and tested on both real and generated datasets. The classification results from the 1-D DCNN on both datasets resulted to be very similar to each other. The presented work in this paper shows that for the cases of insufficient data in DL or ML-based damage diagnostics, 1-D WDCGAN-GP can successfully generate data for the model to be trained on. Keywords: 1-D Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGAN), Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP), 1-D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), Structural Damage Diagnostics, Structural Damage Detection
There has been a major advance in the field of Data Science in the last few decades, and these have been utilized for different engineering disciplines and applications. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms have been utilized for civil Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) especially for damage detection applications using sensor data. Although ML and DL methods show superior learning skills for complex data structures, they require plenty of data for training. However, in SHM, data collection from civil structures can be expensive and time taking; particularly getting useful data (damage associated data) can be challenging. The objective of this study is to address the data scarcity problem for damage detection applications. This paper employs 1-D Wasserstein Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks using Gradient Penalty (1-D WDCGAN-GP) for synthetic labelled acceleration data generation. Then, the generated data is augmented with varying ratios for the training dataset of a 1-D Deep Convolutional Neural Network (1-D DCNN) for damage detection application. The damage detection results show that the 1-D WDCGAN-GP can be successfully utilized to tackle data scarcity in vibration-based damage detection applications of civil structures. Keywords: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), Structural Damage Detection, 1-D Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (1-D DCNN), 1-D Generative Adversarial Networks (1-D GAN), Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP)
Conventional damage localization algorithms used in ultrasonic guided wave-based structural health monitoring (GW-SHM) rely on physics-defined features of GW signals. In addition to requiring domain knowledge of the interaction of various GW modes with various types of damages, they also suffer from errors due to variations in environmental and operating conditions (EOCs) in practical use cases. While several machine learning tools have been reported for EOC compensation, they need to be custom-designed for each combination of damage and structure due to their dependence on physics-defined feature extraction. In this work, we propose a CNN-based automated feature extraction framework coupled with Gaussian mixture model (GMM) based EOC compensation and damage classification and localization method. Features learnt by the CNNs are used for damage classification and localization of damage by modeling the probability distribution of the features using GMMs. The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of these GMMs with respect to corresponding baseline GMMs are used as signal difference coefficients (SDCs) to compute damage indices (DIs) along various GW sensor paths, and thus for damage localization. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated using FE generated GW-data for an aluminum plate with a network of six lead zirconate titanate (PZT) sensors, for three different types of damages (rivet hole, added mass, notch) at various temperatures, with added white noise and pink noise to incorporate errors due to EOCs. We also present experimental validation of the method through characterization of notch damage in an aluminum panel under varying and non-uniform temperature profiles, using a portable custom-designed field programmable gate array (FPGA) based signal transduction and data acquisition system.
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) provides an economic approach which aims to enhance understanding the behavior of structures by continuously collects data through multiple networked sensors attached to the structure. This data is then utilized to gain insight into the health of a structure and make timely and economic decisions about its maintenance. The generated SHM sensing data is non-stationary and exists in a correlated multi-way form which makes the batch/off-line learning and standard two-way matrix analysis unable to capture all of these correlations and relationships. In this sense, the online tensor data analysis has become an essential tool for capturing underlying structures in higher-order datasets stored in a tensor $\mathcal{X} \in \mathbb{R} ^{I_1 \times \dots \times I_N} $. The CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition has been extensively studied and applied to approximate X by N loading matrices A(1), . . . ,A(N) where N represents the order of the tensor. We propose a novel algorithm, FP-CPD, to parallelize the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition of a tensor $\mathcal{X} \in \mathbb{R} ^{I_1 \times \dots \times I_N} $. Our approach is based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm which allows us to parallelize the learning process and it is very useful in online setting since it updates $\mathcal{X}^{t+1}$ in one single step. Our SGD algorithm is augmented with Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG) and perturbation methods to accelerate and guarantee convergence. The experimental results using laboratory-based and real-life structural datasets indicate fast convergence and good scalability.
This paper describes a highly-integrated CMOS system-on-chip (SoC) for active structural health monitoring (SHM). The chip integrates ultrasonic power and bidirectional half-duplex data transfer, a power management unit (PMU), and an ultrasound transceiver to enable wireless ultrasonically-coupled sensor SHM networks on structures. The PMU includes an active bias-flip rectifier with off-delay compensation, high-efficiency dual-path DC-DC converter with inductor time-sharing, and five switched-capacitor DC-DC converters to generate multi-level spectrally band-limited pulses for guided-wave SHM. The chip was fabricated in a standard 180 nm process and has a die area of $2\times 2$ mm$^{2}$. Test results show power conversion efficiency (PCE) $>85\%$ for the active rectifier, $>70$\% for the inductive DC-DC converter, and $>60$\% for the switched-capacitor DC-DC converters. Output pulses have a peak-to-sidelobe ratio (PSL) $>30$~dB and worst-case out-of-band emissions $<-30$~dB, respectively. The SoC was integrated with a low-power microcontroller and passive components to realize miniaturized (15~mm $\times$ 30~mm) wireless SHM nodes. A set of nodes was deployed on an SHM test-bed (carbon fiber reinforced polymer sheet) representing an airframe panel. Tests on this wireless network confirm both long-range ultrasound power/data transfer and the ability to detect structural damage.
Blind identification is popular for modeling a system without the input information, such as in the research areas of structural health monitoring and audio signal processing. Existing blind identification methods have both advantages and disadvantages, in this paper, we briefly outline current methods and propose a novel blind identification method for identifying state-space models in physical coordinates. The idea behind this proposed method is first to regard the collected input data of a state-space model as a part of a periodic signal sequence, and then transform the state-space model with input and output into a model without input by augmenting the state-space model with the input model (which is a periodic signal model), and afterwards use merely the output information to identify a state-space model up to a similarity transformation, and finally derive the state-space model in physical coordinates by using a unique similarity transformation. With the above idea, physical parameters and modal parameters of a state-space system can be obtained. Both numerical and practical examples were used to validate the proposed method. The result showed the effectiveness of the novel blind identification method.