Intelligent Life Prediction of Thermal Barrier Coating for Aero Engine Blades

The existing methods for thermal barrier coating (TBC) life prediction rely mainly on experience and formula derivation and are inefficient and inaccurate. By introducing deep learning into TBC life analyses, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to extract the TBC interface morphology and analyze its life information, which can achieve a high-efficiency accurate judgment of the TBC life. In this thesis, an Adap-Alex algorithm is proposed to overcome the problems related to the large training time, over-fitting, and low accuracy in the existing CNN training of TBC images with complex tissue morphologies. The method adjusts the receptive field size, stride length, and other parameter settings and combines training epochs with a sigmoid function to realize adaptive pooling. TBC data are obtained by thermal vibration experiments, a TBC dataset is constructed, and then the Adap-Alex algorithm is used to analyze the generated TBC dataset. The average training time of the Adap-Alex method is significantly smaller than those of VGG-Net and Alex-Net by 125 and 685 s, respectively. For a fixed number of thermal vibrations, the test accuracy of the Adap-Alex algorithm is higher than those of Alex-Net and VGG-Net, which facilitates the TBC identification. When the number of thermal vibrations is 300, the accuracy reaches 93%, and the performance is highest.

Automated summary

This study introduces a method for thermal barrier coating life prediction using deep learning, and proposes the Adap-Alex algorithm to improve efficiency and accuracy. By adjusting parameter settings and combining appropriate training methods, the Adap-Alex algorithm significantly reduces training time and increases test accuracy, showing superior performance compared to existing methods.