Online Monitoring of Welding Status Based on a DBN Model During Laser Welding

In this research, an auxiliary illumination visual sensor system, an ultraviolet/visible (UVV) band visual sensor system (with a wavelength less than 780 nm), a spectrometer, and a photodiode are employed to capture insights into the high-power disc laser welding process. The features of the visible optical light signal and the reflected laser light signal are extracted by decomposing the original signal captured by the photodiode via the wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) method. The captured signals of the spectrometer mainly have a wavelength of 400–900 nm, and are divided into 25 sub-bands to extract the spectrum features by statistical methods. The features of the plume and spatters are acquired by images captured by the UVV visual sensor system, and the features of the keyhole are extracted from images captured by the auxiliary illumination visual sensor system. Based on these real-time quantized features of the welding process, a deep belief network (DBN) is established to monitor the welding status. A genetic algorithm is applied to optimize the parameters of the proposed DBN model. The established DBN model shows higher accuracy and robustness in monitoring welding status in comparison with a traditional back-propagation neural network (BPNN) model. The effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed DBN are validated by three additional experiments with different welding parameters. Keywords: Online monitoring, Multiple sensors, Wavelet packet decomposition, Deep belief network