Long-term guided wave structural health monitoring in an uncontrolled environment through long short-term principal component analysis

Environmental effects are a significant challenge in guided wave structural health monitoring systems. These effects distort signals and increase the likelihood of false alarms. Many research papers have studied mitigation strategies for common variations in guided wave datasets reproducible in a lab, such as temperature and stress. There are fewer studies and strategies for detecting damage under more unpredictable outdoor conditions. This article proposes a long short-term principal component analysis reconstruction method to detect synthetic damage under highly variational environments, like precipitation, freeze, and other conditions. The method does not require any temperature or other compensation methods and is tested by approximately seven million guided wave measurements collected over 2 years. Results show that our method achieves an area under curve score of near 0.95 when detecting synthetic damage under highly variable environmental conditions.