Crack Detection in Folded Plates With Back-Propagated Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

Engineering structures may face various damages such as crack, delamination, and fatigue in several circumstances. Localizing such damages becomes essential to understand the health of the structures since they may not be able to operate anymore. Among the damage detection techniques, non-destructive methods are considerably more preferred than destructive methods since damage can be located without affecting the structural integrity. However, these methods have several drawbacks in terms of detecting abilities, time consumption, cost, and hardware or software requirements. Employing artificial intelligence techniques could overcome such issues and could provide a powerful damage detection model if the technique is utilized correctly. In this study, the crack localization in flat and folded plate structures has been conducted by employing a Back-propagated Artificial Neural Network (BPANN). For this purpose, cracks with 18 different dimensions have been modeled in flat and four different folded structures by utilizing the Finite Element Method. The dataset required to perform the crack localization procedure includes the first ten natural frequencies of all structures as input variables. As output variables, the dataset contains a total of 500 crack locations for five structures. It is concluded that the BPANN can localize all cracks with an average accuracy of 95.12%.