As one of the most common coupling elements in infrastructures, bolted joints play an important part in ensuring the integrity and safety of the whole system, whose failure may cause disastrous consequences. In recent years, precise detection and evaluation of bolt looseness have attracted numerous researchers' interest. However, the reliability of existing methods cannot be well guaranteed in long-term field detection, and real-time feedback is rather costly. This paper proposes a novel bolt looseness detection method based on audio recognition and deep learning. Firstly, a percussion experiment was designed to collect audio signals of bolts at different torque levels. Then, the time-domain bolt percussion signals were converted into Mel-frequency spectrograms, and the convolutional neural network (CNN) was adopted to mining deep information from the images for classification. To further verify the effect of different initial prestress levels on the vibration frequency of the bolted joint, a numerical study was conducted with the consideration of three different prestress levels. The results reveal that the proposed method has a high recognition accuracy in identifying bolt looseness conditions. Additionally, an iOS APP of acoustic vibration was established for real application. The prerecorded and untrained percussion audio was used to simulate the real-time bolt looseness detection, which shows its potential in real future applications.

Bolt loosening detection is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process for field engineers. This paper develops a two-step computer vision-based framework to quickly identify bolt loosening angle from field images captured by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In step one, a total of 1200 image samples of bolted structures were used to train faster region based convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN) for bolt detection from UAV captured images. In step two, computer vision-based technologies, including Gaussian filter, perspective transform, and Hough transform (HT), were performed to quantify bolt loosening angle. The developed framework was then integrated into web server and an iOS application (app) was designed to enable fast data communication between field workplace (UAV captured images) and web server (bolt loosening angle quantification), so that field engineers can quickly view the inspection results on their phone screens. The proposed framework and designed smartphone app greatly help field engineers to improve the accuracy and efficiency for onsite inspection and maintenance of bolted structures.

No abstract