Steel strands serve as the key load-bearing components of pre-stressed bridges, yet the identification of effective pre-stress for steel strands is a challenging task. In this study, a time and frequency adaptive fusion input-one dimensional convolutional neural network-long short-term memory (TFAFI-1DCNN-LSTM) framework was proposed for ultrasonic guided wave (UGW)-based effective pre-stress identification of steel strands. In this framework, the time and frequency domain signals of UGW were input into the network as two parallel branches, CNN and LSTM were utilized to extract spatial and serial-related features, and a trainable weight coefficient was introduced for adaptive fusion of time and frequency domain features. Firstly, ablation studies were conducted to investigate the influence of each key component in the proposed framework on the prediction results. Secondly, deep learning (DL) models of Res Net, Dense Net and Inception Net were introduced as comparisons, and the prediction results based on TFAFI-1DCNN-LSTM were compared with those based on the above DL models. Thirdly, the noise-robustness and performance under a few trainable samples of TFAFI-1DCNN-LSTM were also investigated. Finally, the outputs of various key layers of the proposed framework were subjected to dimensionality reduction and visualization to provide an intuitive demonstration of the feature extraction process, and the inherent mechanisms of the proposed framework were interpreted using local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME). Results show that the architecture of TFAFI-1DCNN-LSTM is reasonably designed and all key components are necessary. The weights of features in time and frequency domain branches are rationally assigned due to the addition of an adaptive weight coefficient. Compared with other DL models, the proposed TFAFI-1DCNN-LSTM exhibits higher pre-stress identification accuracy, excellent noise-robustness, and superior performance under only a few trainable samples. The correlation between features extracted by the network and the pre-stress labels significantly increases with the deepening of the network, and the correlation between input UGW signals and predicted pre-stress values is effectively interpreted utilizing LIME, proving that the architecture of the proposed framework is reasonable and effective, the predicted results are reliable and credible.
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