Deep Learning-Empowered Digital Twin Using Acoustic Signal for Welding Quality Inspection

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Feb 28;23(5):2643. doi: 10.3390/s23052643.

Abstract

Weld site inspection is a research area of interest in the manufacturing industry. In this study, a digital twin system for welding robots to examine various weld flaws that might happen during welding using the acoustics of the weld site is presented. Additionally, a wavelet filtering technique is implemented to remove the acoustic signal originating from machine noise. Then, an SeCNN-LSTM model is applied to recognize and categorize weld acoustic signals according to the traits of strong acoustic signal time sequences. The model verification accuracy was found to be 91%. In addition, using numerous indicators, the model was compared with seven other models, namely, CNN-SVM, CNN-LSTM, CNN-GRU, BiLSTM, GRU, CNN-BiLSTM, and LSTM. A deep learning model, and acoustic signal filtering and preprocessing techniques are integrated into the proposed digital twin system. The goal of this work was to propose a systematic on-site weld flaw detection approach encompassing data processing, system modeling, and identification methods. In addition, our proposed method could serve as a resource for pertinent research.

Keywords: acoustic signal; deep learning; digital twin; welding site inspection.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.