A hybrid signal pre-processing approach in processing ultrasonic signals with noise

Ultrasonic techniques have the potential to be used to detect sub-surface defects in aluminium castings. However, ultrasonic sensing techniques have not been successfully used to detect sub-surface defects in aluminium die castings with rough surfaces or in the ‘as-cast’ state due to the poor quality of signals. Ultrasonic signal noise caused by rough surfaces and grain size variations of the castings is difficult to eliminate. Hence, there is a need to process noisy ultrasonic signals to identify defects within the rough surface castings. This paper documents an investigation of ultrasonic signal analysis using artificial neural networks and hybrid signal pre-processing approaches for the purpose of detecting defects from noisy ultrasonic signals. In this investigation, ultrasonic signals were obtained from aluminium castings with different levels of surface roughness. The signals were first pre-processed using hybrid signal analysis techniques and then classified using an artificial neural network classifier. The hybrid pre-processing techniques utilised various combinations of fast Fourier transform (FFT), wavelet transform (WT) and principal component analysis. The best signal classification performance was generally achieved with a hybrid WT/FFT signal pre-processing technique.