Research on Feature Extracted Method for Flutter Test Based on EMD and CNN

Due to the inevitable deviations between the results of theoretical calculations and physical experiments, flutter tests and flutter signal analysis often play significant roles in designing the aeroelasticity of a new aircraft. The measured structural response from aeroelastic models in both wind tunnel tests and real fight flutter tests contain an abundance of structural information, but traditional methods tend to have limited ability to extract features of concern. Inspired by deep learning concepts, a novel feature extraction method for flutter signal analysis was established in this study by combining the convolutional neural network (CNN) with empirical mode decomposition (EMD). It is widely hypothesized that when flutter occurs, the measured structural signals are harmonic or divergent in the time domain, and that the flutter modal (1) is singular and (2) its energy increases significantly in the frequency domain. A measured-signal feature extraction and flutter criterion framework was constructed accordingly. The measured signals from a wind tunnel test were manually labeled “flutter” and “no-flutter” as the foundational dataset for the deep learning algorithm. After the normalized preprocessing, the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) of the flutter test signals are obtained by the EMD method. The IMFs are then reshaped to make them the suitable size to be input to the CNN. The CNN parameters are optimized though the training dataset, and the trained model is validated through the test dataset (i.e., cross-validation). The accuracy rate of the proposed method reached 100% on the test dataset. The training model appears to effectively distinguish whether or not the structural response signal contains flutter. The combination of EMD and CNN provides effective feature extraction of time series signals in flutter test data. This research explores the connection between structural response signals and flutter from the perspective of artificial intelligence. The method allows for real-time, online prediction with low computational complexity.