Robust Data-Driven Structural Impact Localization With Multisensor Real-Time Monitoring

Transient impact loads can easily cause structural damage and destruction, especially for composite structures that are susceptible to collisions. An accurate impact source localization method is crucial for evaluating the potential structure damage location. The impact response signals, on the other hand, contain varying degrees of high- and low-frequency noise, and the structure is not limited to a single dimension. In this article, the robust localization method with empirical mode decomposition combined wavelet denoising (EMD-WD) and multi-output support vector regression (MSVR) is proposed. Following the achievement of intrinsic mode function (IMF) of distinct frequency bands, the last order IMF is abandoned to filter the low-frequency disturbance. Following that, the discrete wavelet transform is used to treat high-frequency noise. Then, multidimensional features of impact responses, including time domain (TT), frequency domain (FF), time–frequency domain (TF), and distance domain (DD), are extracted. Finally, MSVR trained with multidimensional feature vectors is used to predict various impact location coordinate values. The results on plate structure and cylinder composite monitoring data prove that the proposed method can realize acceptable localization performance on both the 2-D and 3-D structures compared with other methods, with certain abilities to resist noise interference.