A Novel Piezoceramic-Based Sensing Technology Combined With Visual Domain Networks for Timber Damage Quantification

• Main Authors: Haibei Xiong, Lin Chen, Cheng Yuan, Qingzhao Kong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-08-01
• Series: Frontiers in Materials
• Subjects: timber beam crack; stress wave–based sensing; piezoelectric transducer; computer vision; deep neural network
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmats.2021.688594/full

Early detection of timber damage is essential for the safety of timber structures. In recent decades, wave-based approaches have shown great potential for structural damage assessment. Current damage assessment accuracy based on sensing signals in the time domain is highly affected by the varied boundary conditions and environmental factors in practical applications. In this research, a novel piezoceramic-based sensing technology combined with a visual domain network was developed to quantitatively evaluate timber damage conditions. Numerical and experimental studies reveal the stress wave propagation properties in different cases of timber crack depths. Through the spectrogram visualization process, all sensing signals in the time domain were transferred to images which contain both time and frequency features of signals collected from different crack conditions. A deep neural network (DNN) was adopted for image training, testing, and classification. The classification results show high efficiency and accuracy for identifying crack conditions for timber structures. The proposed technology can be further integrated with a fielding sensing system to provide real-time monitoring of timber damage in field applications.