The cold metal transfer (CMT) process is widely used in thin plate welding because of its characteristics of low heat input and stable arc. In actual production, a larger weld gap, misalignment, or other problems due to assembly error lead to serious welding defects, such as burn-through and a lack of fusion. The arc sound contains a wealth of information related to the quality of the weld. This work analyzes the mechanism of CMT arc sound generation, as well as the correlation between the time–frequency spectrum of the arc sound signal and welding quality. This paper studies the extraction of the multi-channel time–frequency spectrum of an arc sound and inputs it to a custom convolutional neural network for the CMT welding defect identification of thin aluminum alloy plates. The experimental result shows that the average accuracy of the proposed model is 91.49% in the defect identification of a CMT arc-welded aluminum alloy sheet, which is higher than that of the single-channel time–frequency convolutional neural network and other traditional classification models.

In order to obtain comprehensive assessment of the factors influencing fatigue life and to further improve the accuracy of fatigue life prediction of welded joints, soft computing methods, including entropy-based neighborhood rough set reduction algorithm, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and support vector regression machine (SVRM) are combined to construct a fatigue life prediction model of titanium alloy welded joints. By using an entropy-based neighborhood rough set reduction algorithm, the influencing factors of the fatigue life of titanium alloy welded joints such as joint type, plate thickness, etc. are analyzed and the reduction results are obtained. Fatigue characteristic domains are proposed and determined subsequently according to the reduction results. The PSO-SVRM model for fatigue life prediction of titanium alloy welded joints is established in the suggested fatigue characteristic domains. Experimental results show that by taking into account the impact of joint type, the PSO-SVRM model could better predict the fatigue life of titanium alloy welded joints. The PSO-SVRM model indicates the relationship between fatigue life and fatigue life influencing factors in multidimensional space compared with the conventional least-square S-N curve fitting method, it could predict the fatigue life of the titanium alloy welded joints more accurately thus helps to the reliability design of the structure.

Wind turbine blades (WTBs) are prone to damage from their working environment, including surface peeling and cracks. Early and effective detection of surface defects on WTBs can avoid complex and costly repairs and serious safety hazards. Traditional object detection methods have disadvantages of insufficient detection capabilities, extended model inference times, low recognition accuracy for small objects, and elongated strip defects within WTB datasets. In light of these challenges, a novel model named DCW-YOLO for surface damage detection of WTBs is proposed in this research, which leverages image data collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the YOLOv8 algorithm for image analysis. Firstly, Dynamic Separable Convolution (DSConv) is introduced into the C2f module of YOLOv8, allowing the model to more effectively focus on the geometric structural details associated with damage on WTBs. Secondly, the upsampling method is replaced with the content-aware reassembly of features (CARAFE), which significantly minimizes the degradation of image characteristics throughout the upsampling process and boosts the network’s ability to extract features. Finally, the loss function is substituted with the WIoU (Wise-IoU) strategy. This strategy allows for a more accurate regression of the target bounding boxes and helps to improve the reliability in the localization of WTBs damages, especially for low-quality examples. This model demonstrates a notable superiority in surface damage detection of WTBs compared to the original YOLOv8n and has achieved a substantial improvement in the mAP@0.5 metric, rising from 91.4% to 93.8%. Furthermore, in the more rigorous mAP@0.5–0.95 metric, it has also seen an increase from 68.9% to 71.2%.

The research on damage detection in wind turbine blades plays an important role in reducing the risk of shut down in wind turbines. Rapid and accurate damage identification by using efficient detection models is the focus of the current research on damage detection in wind turbine blades. To solve the problems of the complex structure of the model and high time consumption in deep learning models, an improved broad learning system (BLS) model using the algorithm of chunking based on non-local means (NLMs) was proposed, which was called the CBNLM-BLS. The chunked, in-parallel accelerated integral image approach was used to optimize the NLM to speed up the BLS. Experiment results showed that the proposed model achieved a classification accuracy of 99.716%, taking 28.662 s to detect damage in the wind turbine blades. Compared with deep neural network models, such as ResNet, AlexNet and VGG-19, the proposed CBNLM-BLS had higher classification accuracy, shorter training time and less complex model construction and parameters. Compared with traditional BLSs, the CBNLM-BLS had less time complexity. It is of great significance to identify damage in wind turbine blades more efficiently.