1,823 research outputs found

    In-situ health monitoring for wind turbine blade using acoustic wireless sensor networks at low sampling rates

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    PhD ThesisThe development of in-situ structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques represents a challenge for offshore wind turbines (OWTs) in order to reduce the cost of the operation and maintenance (O&M) of safety-critical components and systems. This thesis propos- es an in-situ wireless SHM system based on acoustic emission (AE) techniques. The proposed wireless system of AE sensor networks is not without its own challenges amongst which are requirements of high sampling rates, limitations in the communication bandwidth, memory space, and power resources. This work is part of the HEMOW- FP7 Project, ‘The Health Monitoring of Offshore Wind Farms’. The present study investigates solutions relevant to the abovementioned challenges. Two related topics have been considered: to implement a novel in-situ wireless SHM technique for wind turbine blades (WTBs); and to develop an appropriate signal pro- cessing algorithm to detect, localise, and classify different AE events. The major contri- butions of this study can be summarised as follows: 1) investigating the possibility of employing low sampling rates lower than the Nyquist rate in the data acquisition opera- tion and content-based feature (envelope and time-frequency data analysis) for data analysis; 2) proposing techniques to overcome drawbacks associated with lowering sampling rates, such as information loss and low spatial resolution; 3) showing that the time-frequency domain is an effective domain for analysing the aliased signals, and an envelope-based wavelet transform cross-correlation algorithm, developed in the course of this study, can enhance the estimation accuracy of wireless acoustic source localisa- tion; 4) investigating the implementation of a novel in-situ wireless SHM technique with field deployment on the WTB structure, and developing a constraint model and approaches for localisation of AE sources and environmental monitoring respectively. Finally, the system has been experimentally evaluated with the consideration of the lo- calisation and classification of different AE events as well as changes of environmental conditions. The study concludes that the in-situ wireless SHM platform developed in the course of this research represents a promising technique for reliable SHM for OWTBs in which solutions for major challenges, e.g., employing low sampling rates lower than the Nyquist rate in the acquisition operation and resource constraints of WSNs in terms of communication bandwidth and memory space are presente

    In-Situ Process Monitoring for Metal Additive Manufacturing (AM) Through Acoustic Technique

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    Additive Manufacturing (AM) is currently a widely used technology in different industries such as aerospace, medical, and consumer products. Previously it was mainly used for prototyping of the products, but now it is equally valuable for commercial product manufacturing. More profound understanding is still needed to track and identify defects during the AM process to ensure higher quality products with less material waste. Nondestructive testing becomes an essential form of testing for AM parts, where AE is one of the most used methods for in situ process monitoring. The Acoustic Emission (AE) approach has gained a reputation in nondestructive testing (NDT) as one of the most influential and proven techniques in numerous engineering fields. Material testing through Acoustic Emission (AE) has become one of the most popular techniques in AM because of its capability to detect defects and anomalies and monitor the progress of flaws. Various AE technique approaches have been under investigation for in-situ monitoring of AM products. The preliminary results from AE exploration show promising results which need further investigation on data analysis and signal processing. AE monitoring technique allows finding the defects during the fabrication process, so that failure of the AM can be prevented, or the process condition can be finely tuned to avoid significant damages or waste of materials. In this work, recorded AE data over the Direct Energy Deposition (DED) additive manufacturing process was analyzed by the Machine Learning (ML) algorithm to classify different build conditions. The feature extraction method is used to obtain the required data for further processing. Wavelet transformation of signals has been used to acquire the time-frequency spectrum of the AE signals for different process conditions, and image processing by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to identify the transformed spectrum of different build conditions. The identifiers in AE signals are correlated to the part quality by statistical methods. The results show a promising approach for quality evaluation and process monitoring in AM. In this work, the assessment of deposition properties at different process conditions is also done by optical microscope, Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS), and nanoindentation technique

    Sensor Fusion for Electromagnetic Stress Measurement and Material Characterisation

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    Detrimental residual stresses and microstructure changes are the two major precursors for future sites of failure in ferrous steel engineering components and structures. Although numerous Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) techniques can be used for microstructure and stress assessment, currently there is no single technique which would have the capability to provide a comprehensive picture of these material changes. Therefore the fusion of data from a number of different sensors is required for early failure prediction Electromagnetic (EM) NDE is a prime candidate for this type of inspection, since the response to Electromagnetic excitation can be quantified in several different ways: e.g. eddy currents, Barkhausen emission, flux leakage, and a few others. This chapter reviews the strengths of different electromagnetic NDE methods, provides an analysis of the different sensor fusion techniques such as sensor physical system fusion through different principles and detecting devices, and/or feature selection and fusion, and/or information fusion. Two sensor fusion case studies are presented: pulsed eddy current thermography at sensor level and integrative electromagnetic methods for stress and material characterisation at feature (parameters) level

    Structural Health Monitoring in Composite Structures: A Comprehensive Review.

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    This study presents a comprehensive review of the history of research and development of different damage-detection methods in the realm of composite structures. Different fields of engineering, such as mechanical, architectural, civil, and aerospace engineering, benefit excellent mechanical properties of composite materials. Due to their heterogeneous nature, composite materials can suffer from several complex nonlinear damage modes, including impact damage, delamination, matrix crack, fiber breakage, and voids. Therefore, early damage detection of composite structures can help avoid catastrophic events and tragic consequences, such as airplane crashes, further demanding the development of robust structural health monitoring (SHM) algorithms. This study first reviews different non-destructive damage testing techniques, then investigates vibration-based damage-detection methods along with their respective pros and cons, and concludes with a thorough discussion of a nonlinear hybrid method termed the Vibro-Acoustic Modulation technique. Advanced signal processing, machine learning, and deep learning have been widely employed for solving damage-detection problems of composite structures. Therefore, all of these methods have been fully studied. Considering the wide use of a new generation of smart composites in different applications, a section is dedicated to these materials. At the end of this paper, some final remarks and suggestions for future work are presented

    Blind Multiridge Detection and Reconstruction Using Ultrasonic Signals

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    Time-frequency signal analysis has been widely applied in the modern radar, acoustic, sonar and ultrasonic signal processing techniques. Recently, the nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques via the ultrasonic instrumentation have shown the striking capability of the quality control for the material fabrication industry. In this thesis, we first provide a general mathematical model for the ultrasonic signals collected by pulse-echo sensors and then design a totally blind, novel, signal processing NDT technique relying on neither a priori signal information nor any manual effort. The signature signal can be blindly extracted by using the automatic optimal frame size selection for further modeling and characterization of the ultrasonic signal using Gabor analysis. This modeled signature signal is used for multiridge detection and for reconstruction of the signal. The detected ridge information can be used to estimate the transmission and attenuation coefficients, shear modulus, and Young’s modulus associated with any arbitrary material sample for fabrication quality control. Thus, our algorithm can be applied for ultrasonic signal characterization and ridge detection in non-destructive testing for new material fabrication. Experimental results show that the ridge detection performance by our proposed method is superior to that of the existing techniques

    Nondestructive Testing (NDT)

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    The aim of this book is to collect the newest contributions by eminent authors in the field of NDT-SHM, both at the material and structure scale. It therefore provides novel insight at experimental and numerical levels on the application of NDT to a wide variety of materials (concrete, steel, masonry, composites, etc.) in the field of Civil Engineering and Architecture

    A Robust Method for Drilling Monitoring using Acoustic Emission

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    Acoustic Emission (AE) is considered an efficient tool for monitoring of machining operations, for both tool condition and working piece integrity. However, the use of AE is more challenging in case of drilling, due to heavy dependence of AE signals to process parameters. Monitoring drilling using AE thus requires robust methods to extract useful information in signals. The paper describes such a method that adapts itself to AE signals obtained during drilling, allowing the automatic set-up of an adaptive threshold to perform AE count rate. Experiments have been conducted that show the robustness of the method and its usefulness in drilling monitoring.International audienceAcoustic Emission (AE) is considered an efficient tool for monitoring of machining operations, for both tool condition and working piece integrity. However, the use of AE is more challenging in case of drilling, due to heavy dependence of AE signals to process parameters. Monitoring drilling using AE thus requires robust methods to extract useful information in signals. The paper describes such a method that adapts itself to AE signals obtained during drilling, allowing the automatic set-up of an adaptive threshold to perform AE count rate. Experiments have been conducted that show the robustness of the method and its usefulness in drilling monitoring

    Structural Health Monitoring of Pipelines in Radioactive Environments Through Acoustic Sensing and Machine Learning

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    Structural health monitoring (SHM) comprises multiple methodologies for the detection and characterization of stress, damage, and aberrations in engineering structures and equipment. Although, standard commercial engineering operations may freely adopt new technology into everyday operations, the nuclear industry is slowed down by tight governmental regulations and extremely harsh environments. This work aims to investigate and evaluate different sensor systems for real-time structural health monitoring of piping systems and develop a novel machine learning model to detect anomalies from the sensor data. The novelty of the current work lies in the development of an LSTM-autoencoder neural network to automate anomaly detection on pipelines based on a fiber optic acoustic transducer sensor system. Results show that pipeline events and faults can be detected by the MLM developed, with a high degree of accuracy and low rate of false positives even in a noisy environment near pumps and machinery
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