Impact Damage Localization in Composite Structures Using Data-Driven Machine Learning Methods

Due to the uncertainty of material properties of plate-like structures, many traditional methods are unable to locate the impact source on their surface in real time. It is important to study the impact source-localization problem for plate structures. In this paper, a data-driven machine learning method is proposed to detect impact sources in plate-like structures and its effectiveness is tested on three plate-like structures with different material properties. In order to collect data on the localization of the impact source, four piezoelectric transducers and an oscilloscope were utilized to construct an experimental platform for impulse response testing. Meanwhile, the position of the impact source on the surface of the test plate is generated by manually releasing the steel ball. The eigenvalue of arrival time in the time domain signal is extracted to build data sets for machine learning. This paper uses the Back Propagation (BP) neural network to learn the difference in the arrival time of each sensor and predict the location of the impact source. The results demonstrate that the machine learning method proposed in this paper can predict the location of the impact source in the plate-like structure without relying on the material properties, with high test accuracy and robustness. The research work in this paper can provide experimental methods and testing techniques for locating impact damage in composite material structures.