Ensemble Feature Selection for Clustering Damage Modes in Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Sandwich Composites Using Acoustic Emission

Abstract

Acoustic emission (AE) serves as a noninvasive technique for real-time structural health monitoring, capturing the stress waves produced by the formation and growth of cracks within a material. This study presents a novel ensemble feature selection methodology to rank features highly relevant with damage modes in AE signals gathered from edgewise compression tests on honeycomb-core carbon fiber-reinforced polymer. Two distinct features, amplitude and peak frequency, are selected for labeling the AE signals. An ensemble-supervised feature selection method ranks feature importance according to these labels. Using the ranking list, unsupervised clustering models are then applied to identify damage modes. The comparative results reveal a robust correlation between the damage modes and the features of counts and energy when amplitude is selected. Similarly, when peak frequency is chosen, a significant association is observed between the damage modes and the features of partial powers 1 and 2. These findings demonstrate that, in addition to the commonly used features, other features, such as partial powers, exhibit a correlation with damage modes.