Intelligent damage detection in composite pressure vessels under varying environmental and operational conditions

Despite proven approaches available in the literature, structural health monitoring by ultrasonic guided waves under varying environmental and operational conditions is still challenging. The use of machine learning approaches is discussed in this work, considering the complex problem of experimental damage detection under varying load conditions in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel for hydrogen storage. Specifically, unsupervised methods originally developed for image and time series classification are combined with ensemble voting to conceive reliable damage detection technique. This enables the effective combination of the predictions of multiple transducer pairs, even with a limited number of strong individual classifiers. A performance demonstration of the technique is presented using a real damage scenario dataset.