A Novel Approach for Real-Time Quality Monitoring in Machining of Aerospace Alloy through Acoustic Emission Signal Transformation for DNN

David Adeniji, Kyle Oligee, Julius Schoop

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

Gamma titanium aluminide (γ-TiAl) is considered a high-performance, low-density replacement for nickel-based superalloys in the aerospace industry due to its high specific strength, which is retained at temperatures above 800C. However, low damage tolerance, i.e., brittle material behavior with a propensity to rapid crack propagation, has limited the application of γ-TiAl. Any cracks introduced during manufacturing would dramatically lower the useful (fatigue) life of γ-TiAl components, making the workpiece surface’s quality from finish machining a critical component to product quality and performance. To address this issue and enable more widespread use of γ-TiAl, this research aims to develop a real-time non-destructive evaluation (NDE) quality monitoring technique based on acoustic emission (AE) signals, wavelet transform, and deep neural networks (DNN). Previous efforts have opted for traditional approaches to AE signal analysis, using statistical feature extraction and classification, which face challenges such as the extraction of good/relevant features and low classification accuracy. Hence, this work proposes a novel AI-enabled method that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract rich and relevant features from a two-dimensional image representation of 1D time-domain AE signals (known as scalograms), subsequently classifying the AE signature based on pedigreed experimental data and finally predicting the process-induced surface quality. The results of the present work show good classification accuracy of 80.83% using scalogram images, in-situ experimental data, and a VGG-19 pre-trained neural network, establishing the significant potential for real-time quality monitoring in manufacturing processes.

Original languageEnglish
Article number18
JournalJournal of Manufacturing and Materials Processing
Volume6
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Funding

Funding: This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Advanced Manufacturing Office’s (AMO) DE-FOA-0001980, Award Number DE-EE0009121/0000, project title “AI-Enabled Discovery and Physics-Based Optimization of Energy-Efficient Processing Strategies for Advanced Turbine Alloys”.

FundersFunder number
U.S. Department of Energy EPSCoR
Advanced Manufacturing OfficeDE-EE0009121/0000, DE-FOA-0001980
Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

    Keywords

    • Aerospace
    • Manufacturing
    • NDE
    • Surface integrity
    • Titanium aluminide

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Mechanics of Materials
    • Mechanical Engineering
    • Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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