Towards rapid fatigue assessment of UHPC for wind turbine towers: A sparse-data-driven prediction framework via DeepONet with latent vector adaptation
Rapid assessment of high-cycle fatigue degradation in ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) is constrained by the long duration of full-lifecycle fatigue testing. This study develops an uncertainty-aware Bayesian transfer learning framework (U-BTL) that combines Deep Operator Networks with specimen-specific latent adaptation to reconstruct long-term stiffness-degradation trajectories from sparse early-cycle observations. During Stage I, operator learning is supported by measured source trajectories, low-weight Weibull-IDW augmentation restricted to the experimentally supported source domain, an exact initial-stiffness boundary K ( 0 ) = 1 , an irreversible-degradation constraint, and a terminal-stiffness surrogate. During Stage II, the pretrained operator is frozen and a specimen-specific latent vector is calibrated probabilistically from a fixed early-cycle observation window. The posterior uncertainty is subsequently propagated to long-term stiffness and threshold-crossing predictions. The evaluation distinguishes interpolation validation from fully held-out out-of-distribution conditions involving an unseen fiber configuration and an unseen stress level. The results demonstrate that Bayesian latent adaptation can reduce specimen-specific prediction bias while providing probabilistic uncertainty bounds for future degradation trajectories. The present validation is restricted to constant-amplitude laboratory UHPC specimens; therefore, the proposed framework is interpreted as a constitutive-level fatigue-prognosis kernel whose future integration into wind-turbine structural monitoring requires additional variable-amplitude, structural-scale, and field validation.
Authors
- Ou Geng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7545-2437)
- Qiuyan Yan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5159-4633)
- Zhen Guo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2142-6938)
- Xiaoyu Xin
- Fumin Li
Institutions
- China University of Mining and Technology (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Engineering Structures
- Published
- 2026-10-17
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2026.123989
- Primary Topic
- Structural Health Monitoring Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China