Deep Learning-based Fracture Mode Determination in Composite Laminates

This study focuses on the determination of the fracture mode in composite laminates using deep learning.With the increase in the use of laminated composites in numerous engineering applications, the insurance of their integrity and performance is of paramount importance.However, owing to the complex nature of these materials, the identification of fracture modes is often a tedious and time-consuming task that requires critical domain knowledge.Therefore, to alleviate these issues, this study aims to utilize modern artificial intelligence technology to automate the fractographic analysis of laminated composites.To accomplish this goal, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of fractured tensile test specimens are obtained from laminated composites to showcase various fracture modes.These SEM images are then categorized based on numerous fracture modes, including fiber breakage, fiber pull-out, mix-mode fracture, matrix brittle fracture, and matrix ductile fracture.Next, the collective data for all classes are divided into train, test, and validation datasets.Two state-of-the-art, deep learning-based pre-trained models, namely, DenseNet and GoogleNet, are trained to learn the discriminative features for each fracture mode.The DenseNet models shows training and testing accuracies of 94.01% and 75.49%, respectively, whereas those of the GoogleNet model are 84.55% and 54.48%, respectively.The trained deep learning models are then validated on unseen validation datasets.This validation demonstrates that the DenseNet model, owing to its deeper architecture, can extract high-quality features, resulting in 84.44% validation accuracy.This value is 36.84%higher than that of the GoogleNet model.Hence, these results affirm that the DenseNet model is effective in performing fractographic analyses of laminated composites by predicting fracture modes with high precision.