A fatigue crack growth prediction method on small datasets based on optimized deep neural network and Delaunay data augmentation

Abstract

The neural network-based prediction method has shown great potential in the field of fatigue crack growth prediction due to its powerful nonlinear processing and generalization capabilities. However, traditional deep neural network-based methods often encounter problems such as overfitting, underfitting, and instability when predicting FCG rates on small datasets. To address these issues, this study proposes a SA-DNN prediction method for metal fatigue crack growth by introducing Delaunay data augmentation and simulated annealing algorithm into the basic DNN framework. The proposed SA-DNN model is then used to predict the fatigue crack growth process of AM60B magnesium alloy and 7055 Al alloy, and the intrinsic and extrinsic generalization abilities of the model are evaluated. In both the evaluation of intrinsic and extrinsic generalization abilities, the mean squared errors of the training, validation, and testing sets rapidly converge to the target error in various epochs. The lowest mean squared errors achieved are 1.07 e-5 and 1.241 e-5, respectively. Moreover, the results also indicate that the proposed model can accurately predict the fatigue crack growth process of metal materials with varying degrees of nonlinearity.