Semi-supervised and unsupervised learning for health indicator extraction from guided waves in aerospace composite structures

Health indicators (HIs) are central to diagnosing and prognosing the condition of aerospace composite structures, enabling efficient maintenance and operational safety. However, extracting reliable HIs remains challenging due to variability in material properties, stochastic damage evolution, and diverse damage modes. Manufacturing defects (e.g. disbonds) and in-service incidents (e.g. bird strikes) further complicate this process. This study presents a comprehensive data-driven framework that learns HIs via two learning approaches integrated with multi-domain signal processing. Because ground-truth HIs are unavailable, a semi-supervised and an unsupervised approach are proposed: (i) a diversity deep semi-supervised anomaly detection (Diversity-DeepSAD) approach augmented with continuous auxiliary labels used as hypothetical damage proxies, which overcomes the limitation of prior binary labels and enables modelling of intermediate degradation, and (ii) a degradation-trend-constrained variational autoencoder (DTC-VAE), in which the monotonicity criterion is embedded via an explicit trend constraint. Guided waves with multiple excitation frequencies are used to monitor single-stiffener composite structures under fatigue loading. Time, frequency, and time–frequency representations are explored, and per-frequency HIs are fused via unsupervised ensemble learning to mitigate frequency dependence and reduce variance. Using fast Fourier transform features, the models achieved fitness scores of 81.6% (Diversity-DeepSAD) and 92.3% (DTC-VAE), indicating improved monotonicity and consistency over existing baselines. The proposed history-independent framework, supported by prognostic metrics–guided Bayesian optimisation and excitation frequency-agnostic HI fusion, enables the estimation of more robust HIs for aeronautical composite structures. • History-free HI construction from guided waves for aerospace composites. • Developing data-driven framework tackling manufacturing/operational uncertainties. • Augmented Diversity-DeepSAD (continuous labels) and DTC-VAE (trend constraints). • Unsupervised fusion across excitation frequencies improves stability and accuracy. • Leave-one-out validation; best model achieves 92.3% on metrics with low variance.