Evaluation of tile-wall bonding integrity based on impact acoustics and support vector machine

It is well recognized that the impact-acoustic emissions contain information that can indicate the presence of the adhesive defects in the bonding structures. In our previous papers, artificial neural network (ANN) was adopted to assess the bonding integrity of the tile-walls with the feature extracted from the power spectral density (PSD) of the impact-acoustic signals acting as the input of classifier. However, in addition to the inconvenience posed by the general drawbacks such as long training time and large number of training samples needed, the performance of the classic ANN classifier is deteriorated by the similar spectral characteristics between different bonding status caused by abnormal impacts. In this paper our previous works was developed by the employment of the least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) classifier instead of the ANN to derive a bonding integrity recognition approach with better reliability and enhanced immunity to surface roughness. With the help of the specially designed artificial sample slabs, experiments results obtained with the proposed method are provided and compared with that using the ANN classifier, demonstrating the effectiveness of the present strategy. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.