A feature learning-based method for impact load reconstruction and localization of the plate-rib assembled structure

Impact load is the load that machines frequently experienced in engineering applications. Its time-history reconstruction and localization are crucial for structural health monitoring and reliability analysis. However, when identifying random impact loads, conventional inversion methods usually do not perform well because of complex formula derivation, infeasibility of nonlinear structure, and ill-posed problem. Deep learning methods have great ability of feature learning and nonlinear representation as well as comprehensive regularization mechanism. Therefore, a new feature learning-based method is proposed to conduct impact load reconstruction and localization. The proposed method mainly includes two parts. The first part is designed to reconstruct impact load, named convolutional-recurrent encoder–decoder neural network (ED-CRNN). The other part is constructed to localize impact load, called deep convolutional-recurrent neural network (DCRNN). The ED-CRNN utilizes the one-dimensional (1-D) convolutional encoder–decoder to obtain low-dimension feature representations of input signals. Two long short-term memory (LSTM) layers and a bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) layer are uniformly distributed in this network to learn the relationship between input features and the output load in time steps. The DCRNN is constructed mainly by two 1-D convolutional neural network (CNN) layers and two BiLSTM layers to learn high-hidden-level spatial as well as temporal features. The fully connected layers are placed at the end to localize an impact load. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated by two numerical studies and two experiments. The results reveal that the proposed method has the ability to accurately and quickly reconstruct and localize the impact load of complex assembled structure. Furthermore, the performance of the DCRNN is related to the number of sensors and the architecture of the network. Meanwhile, the strategy of alternating layout is proposed to reduce the number of training locations.