Dynamic welding process monitoring based on microphone array technology

Abstract In this paper, microphone array technology was used to monitor the dynamic pulsed GMAW process. At first, the splash sound signal is successfully separated out based on FastICA blind signal separation algorithm, and its frequency domain energy distribution is mainly concentrated in the high frequency band of 6000−8000 Hz. Through time and frequency domain analysis, it is found that the short-time energy of 500−1000 Hz band of observed signal and the short-time energy of splash signal can identify the burn-through defects well, furthermore the ratio of them can be used as a robust feature because of its high sensitivity and anti-interference performance. Since the splash sound signal is a characteristic signal separated by microphone array, it is shown that the abundant dynamic information provided by microphone array can better assist in the identification and monitoring of welding defects compared to a single microphone. In order to solve the serious imbalance problem between positive and negative samples, the logistic regression and BP neural network model are improved based on the machine learning method. The experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of the optimization models have been greatly improved, even could reach 99.6 %.