Intelligent Timber Damage Monitoring Using PZT-Enabled Active Sensing and Intrinsic Multiscale Entropy Analysis

Abstract

Timber has been commonly used in the field of civil engineering, and the health condition of timber is of great significance for the whole structure in practical scenarios. However, due to mechanical load and environmental impact, timber-based constructions are vulnerable to termite attack, microbial corrosion and fractures within their service lives. Thus, the damage monitoring of timber structures is very challenging under real situations. This paper presents an intelligent timber damage monitoring approach using Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT)-enabled active sensing and intrinsic multiscale entropy analysis. The proposed approach adopts PZT-enabled active sensing to collect the signals depicting dynamic characteristics of the timber structure. The proposed intrinsic multiscale entropy analysis utilizes variational mode decomposition (VMD) to deal with the collected response signals. Decomposition of the response signals into a set of band-limited intrinsic mode functions (BLIMFs) denoting nonlinear and nonstationary characteristics. Then multiscale sample entropy (MSE) is employed to extract quantitative features, which are adopted as health condition indicators of timber structures. Finally, the convolutional neural network (CNN) fulfills the intelligent timber damage monitoring by using the quantitative features as the effective input. The research findings reveal the efficacy and superiority of the proposed method.