A Hybrid Deep Transfer Learning Framework for Delamination Identification in Composite Laminates

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has proven to be an effective technique to maintain the safety and reliability of laminated composites. Recently, both deep learning and machine learning methodologies have gained popularity in sensor-based SHM. However, machine learning approaches often require tedious manual feature extraction, while deep learning models require large training datasets, which may not be feasible. To overcome these limitations, this study presents a hybrid deep transfer learning (HTL) framework to identify delamination in composite laminates. The proposed framework enhances SHM performance by utilizing pre-trained EfficientNet and ResNet models to allow for deep feature extraction with limited data. EfficientNet contributes to this by efficiently scaling the model to capture multi-scale spatial features, while ResNet contributes by extracting hierarchical representations through its residual connections. Vibration signals from piezoelectric (PZT) sensors attached to the composite laminates, consisting of three health states, are used to validate the approach. Compared to the existing transfer learning approaches, the suggested method achieved better performance, hence improving both the accuracy and robustness of delamination detection in composite structures.