Artificial Intelligence Based Approach for Predicting Fatigue Strength Using Composition and Process Parameters

Abstract

Accurate prediction of the fatigue strength of steels is vital, due to the extremely high cost (and time) of fatigue testing and the often fatal consequences of fatigue failures. The work presented in this paper is an extension of the previous paper submitted to OMAE 2019. The main objective of this manuscript is to utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict fatigue strength, based on composition and process parameters, using the fatigue dataset for carbon and low alloy steel available from the National Institute of Material Science (NIMS) database, MatNavi. A deep learning framework Keras is used to build a Neural Network (NN), which is trained and tested on the data set obtained from MatNavi. The fatigue strength values estimated using NN are compared to the values predicted by the gradient boosting algorithm, which was the most accurate model in the OMAE 2019 paper. The comparison is done using metrics such as root mean square error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Coefficient of Determination (R2) and Explained Variance Score(EVS). Thereafter, the trained NN model is used to make predictions of fatigue strength for the simulated data (1 million samples) of input parameters, which is then used to generate conditional probability tables for the Bayesian Network (BN). The main advantage of using BN over previously used machine learning algorithms is that BN can be used to make both forward and backward propagation during the Bayesian inference. A case study illustrating the applicability of the proposed approach is also presented. Furthermore, a dashboard is developed using PowerBI, which can be used by practicing engineers to estimate fatigue strength based on composition and process parameters.