Characterization of Biocomposites and Glass Fiber Epoxy Composites Based on Acoustic Emission Signals, Deep Feature Extraction, and Machine Learning

• Published in: Sensors
• Main Authors: Tomaž Kek, Primož Potočnik, Martin Misson, Zoran Bergant, Mario Sorgente, Edvard Govekar, Roman Šturm
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2022-09-01
• Subjects: polymer composites; biocomposites; GFE composites; acoustic emission; deep feature extraction; convolutional autoencoder
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/18/6886

This study presents the results of acoustic emission (AE) measurements and characterization in the loading of biocomposites at room and low temperatures that can be observed in the aviation industry. The fiber optic sensors (FOS) that can outperform electrical sensors in challenging operational environments were used. Standard features were extracted from AE measurements, and a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) was applied to extract deep features from AE signals. Different machine learning methods including discriminant analysis (DA), neural networks (NN), and extreme learning machines (ELM) were used for the construction of classifiers. The analysis is focused on the classification of extracted AE features to classify the source material, to evaluate the predictive importance of extracted features, and to evaluate the ability of used FOS for the evaluation of material behavior under challenging low-temperature environments. The results show the robustness of different CAE configurations for deep feature extraction. The combination of classic and deep features always significantly improves classification accuracy. The best classification accuracy (80.9%) was achieved with a neural network model and generally, more complex nonlinear models (NN, ELM) outperform simple models (DA). In all the considered models, the selected combined features always contain both classic and deep features.