Acoustic Monitoring

Na Lv · Shanben Chen
Key Technologies
of Intelligentized
Welding
Manufacturing
Welding Arc Acoustic Sensing and
Monitoring Technology
Key Technologies of Intelligentized Welding
Manufacturing
Na Lv Shanben Chen
•
Key Technologies
of Intelligentized Welding
Manufacturing
Welding Arc Acoustic Sensing
and Monitoring Technology
123
Na Lv Shanben Chen
School of Electronic Information School of Materials Science and Engineering
and Electrical Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, China
Shanghai, China
ISBN 978-981-15-2001-3 ISBN 978-981-15-2002-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under
the grant nos. 51975367, 51075268, Startup Fund for Youngman Research at SJTU
(SFYR at SJTU) no. 18X100040049 and Shanghai Sciences and Technology
Committee under grant no. 09JC1407100, People’s Republic of China. The author
wishes to acknowledge the relative study works finished by Dr. Fang Gu, Dr. Liu
Lijun, Dr. Fan Ding, Dr. Ma Yuezhou, Dr. Wang Jifeng, Dr. Chen Bo, Dr. Chen
Huabin, Dr. Xu Yanling, Dr. Zhang Zhifen, Dr. Chen Chao and Mr. Zhao
Liangqiang, Miss. Zhang Huanhuan, Miss. Yo Bo and so on.
v
Contents
1 Multi-source Information of Arc Welding Dynamic Process . . . . . . 1

1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Acoustic Signal of Welding Dynamic Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Classification of Welding Acoustic Signal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Feature and Application Value of Arc Sound Signal . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.5 Influencing Factor of Arc Sound Signal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.6 Microphone Array Measurement of Arc Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2 Acoustic Mechanism and Arc Sound Source Modeling
for GTAW Welding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... 9
2.1 Basic Arc Sound Source Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... 9
2.1.1 Weld Pool Oscillation Model of Arc Sound . . . ....... 9
2.1.2 Analysis and Validation of Sound Source
for GTAW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....... 12
2.1.3 Influence of Welding Parameters on Arc Sound
Signal During Dynamic Welding . . . . . . . . . . . ....... 14
3 Feature Extraction and Analysis of Arc Sound Signal
with Dynamic Welding Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.1 Welding Operation System Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.2 Arc Sound Signal Preprocessing Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.2.1 Removal of DC Component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3.2.2 Noise-Removal Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3.2.3 Region of Interest (ROI) Selected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.2.4 Window Function Addition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.2.5 Analysis of Arc Sound Signal in Short Time
Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 25
3.2.6 Frequency-Domain Analysis of Arc Sound Signal . . . ... 26
3.2.7 Time–Frequency Analysis of Arc Sound Signal . . . . . ... 29
3.2.8 Relationship Between Sound Feature and Penetration
of Weld Pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 31
vii
viii Contents
4 Channel Generation Mechanism and Modeling

for Arc Sound Signal During GTAW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 37
4.1 Generation Mechanism of Arc Sound Channel . . . . . . . . . . . ... 37
4.2 Arc Sound Channel Modeling Based on Cepstrum
Coefficient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 39
4.2.1 A Mathematical Model Based on Cepstrum Analysis . ... 40
4.2.2 Cepstrum Coefficients Model of the Arc Sound
Signal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 42
4.3 Arc Sound Channel Modeling Based on Linear Predictive
Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 43
5 Prediction Model Establishment Based on Arc Sound Feature
Array . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 51
5.1 Welding Penetration Recognition Analysis Using
Arc Sound Signal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 53
5.2 Prediction Model Using BP_AdaBoost Neural Network
for GATW Welding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
5.3 Classification Model Using Hidden Markov Model . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5.3.1 Wavelet Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
5.3.2 Modeling Based on Hidden Markov Model . . . . . . . . . . . 60
5.3.3 Comparing with Traditional Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
6 Relationship Modeling Between Weld Pool Collapse
and Welding Penetration Based on Analyzing Arc
Sound Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 67
6.1 Welding Experimental Design and Arc Sound Signal
Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
6.2 Processing of Arc Sound Signal for Weld Pool Collapse . . . . . . . 68
6.2.1 De-DC Component Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
6.2.2 Denoising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
6.3 Accuracy Verification Test for Prediction Model Based
on Arc Sound Feature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
6.3.1 The Piecewise Linear Fitting for Arc Length . . . . . . . . . . 71
6.3.2 Validation of Arc Length Prediction Model . . . . . . . . . . . 72
6.4 Prediction Experiment of Welding Pool Collapse . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
7 Real-Time Control of Welding Penetration via Arc Sound
Signal for GTAW Welding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 81
7.1 Design of Real-Time Processing Software for Arc Sound
Signal During GTAW Welding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 81
7.2 Arc Height Tracking Control Experiment via Arc Sound
Signal of GTAW Welding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 83
7.3 Welding Penetration Control Experiment via Arc Sound
Signal of GTAW Welding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 86
Contents ix
8 Microphone Array Technology in Welding Dynamic Process

Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 97
8.1 Establishment of Microphone Array Acquisition System . . . . ... 97
8.2 Research of Blind Signal Separation in Welding Dynamic
Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
8.2.1 FastICA Blind Signal Separation Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . 100
8.2.2 FastICA Blind Signal Separation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
8.3 Arc Sound Signal Analyzed by Dynamic Welding Process . . . . . 104
8.3.1 Feature Extraction of Dual-Microphone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
8.3.2 Establish Linear Fitting Model of Dual-Microphone . . . . . 106
8.3.3 Establish Linear Fitting Model of Dual-Microphone . . . . . 108
8.3.4 Improvement of Prediction Model for
Dual-Microphone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
8.4 Welding Dynamic Process Monitoring via Microphone Array . . . 114
8.4.1 Time Delay Estimation Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
8.4.2 Inspection and Localization of Welding Defects . . . . . . . 115
8.4.3 Welding Defects Localization and Recognition . . . . . . . . 120
9 Multi-source Information Fusion Between Welding Arc Sound
and Other Welding Dynamic Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
10 Summary and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Chapter 1
Multi-source Information of Arc Welding
Dynamic Process
1.1 Introduction
Nowadays, the research on intelligent and automatic welding process information

monitoring has been getting more concern, within the rise of intelligent manufactur-
ing industry [1–4]. However, when automatic and intelligent technology is applied in
welding industrial production process, the open-loop control method mainly adopts
input parameters to control the output characteristics. The output characteristics can-
not be fed back to the input parameters. This leads to the application of the automatic
welding technology scope only confined to a single-structure, shape-fixed welding.
For those welding specimens with complex shape and unpredictable environment,
experienced welding workers still need to adapt to the changing environment inde-
pendently and obtain high welding quality. As the material connection technology has
been extended to aerospace, nuclear power equipment, underwater equipment and
other areas, these special environments require higher welding quality and precision
of equipment. Therefore, more researchers pay attention to the study and application
of closed-loop control of real-time welding quality. Meanwhile, the development of
related hardware and software technologies of high-speed sensing technology, data
acquisition technology and signal processing technology, as well as the extensive use
of intelligent control algorithm, have laid a theoretical foundation for the research
of arc welding process information extraction and quality control.
The most important step for the realization of intelligent welding technology is
to obtain and analyze the dynamic information of the welding process, and to cor-
respond, quantify and model the characteristics of all kinds of information with the
weld pool state. The real-time online closed-loop control of welding quality could
be achieved through the analysis of arc information [5, 6]. The welding process itself
is a transition process of solid–liquid–solid phase caused by arc heat source, which
contains the sound, light, electricity and other information. The information is cor-
responding to the dynamic change process of welding pool. Therefore, many studies
have been done in the field of dynamic information acquisition and feature extraction
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 1

N. Lv and S. Chen, Key Technologies of Intelligentized Welding Manufacturing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_1
2 1 Multi-source Information of Arc Welding Dynamic Process
algorithm for many years, including the visual image information, arc information,
arc sound information, spectral information, pool oscillation information and the
temperature information of weld pool. The researches of various sensors have char-
acterized the statement of dynamic welding process from different perspectives. Each
of them has its advantages and limitations.
In all, the welding quality control based on multi-information can be considered
as an imitation of human behavior process. It mainly refers to the operation process
of the professional welder, including the acquisition of welding process information,
such as the shape of weld pool and the arc sound signal. The information is processed
and analyzed by the human brain. The welding condition is judged to be stable or
unstable. In order to achieve automatic welding quality control, it is crucial to obtain
the multi-information with high precision and high frequency.
1.2 Acoustic Signal of Welding Dynamic Process
Professional welders perceive and control the dynamic formation process of weld
joint by observing the shape and size of the pool. As the literature analysis of visual
sensing [7–9] suggests, it is feasible to simulate the welder’s eyes to obtain the rel-
evant information. However, limited by current size of visual sensor and the adapt-
ability of image processing algorithm, various factors will affect the image collection
in practical applications, such as smoke, metal evaporation and splashing.
From the perspective of bionics, the welder could operate the welding dynamic
process only using the eyes and ears. Considering this assumption, many researchers
started to pay attention to the acoustic signal generated during welding process.
As the best assistant of visual information, acoustic signal has been considered as
valuable information because of its abundant information, good instantaneity and
non-contact. In order to find out whether acoustic signal plays a role in welding
monitoring, some scientists in Canada designed special experiments to prove the
decisive significance of sound signal in determining the quality of welding process
[10]. The experiment is conducted by putting on the headset for the welder, playing
music to him or delaying the welding acoustic into the welder’s ears. The experiment
system is shown in Fig. 1.1. The welding quality fluctuates significant while the
acoustic signal is delayed. The results showed that the acoustic signal played an
important role in the quality discrimination of welders. It also illustrated that visual
and auditory signals had some complementary functions in judging the welding
process. Combining these two sensors will pave the way for the comprehensive
realization of the intelligent automatic welding process.
The sound itself is a pressure wave produced when an object vibrates. It alter-
nately compresses and pushes molecules of the surrounding propagation medium.
In the arc welding process, there are three sound sources of acoustic signal: welding
arc, welding shielding gas and welding equipments (such as welding machine, wire
feeder and other peripheral equipment). In literature [11, 12], the scientists proved
that the acoustic signal generated by shielding gas and welding equipment is very
1.2 Acoustic Signal of Welding Dynamic Process 3
Fig. 1.1 Welder psycho-acoustic experiment
weak compared with the one generated from the arc itself through welding pro-
cess. Therefore, this illustrated that the noise signal would not affect the analysis of
acoustic signal. That is why the researchers would like to name the acoustic signal of
welding with “the arc sound signal”. In all, the research concerning sound source of
welding has grown greatly alongside with tremendous progress, however, the anal-
ysis was narrowed to rational analysis with no formula validation. Further studies
about sound source of welding arc can pay more attention to the mathematical model
and physical model establishment.
1.3 Classification of Welding Acoustic Signal
Welding arc sound is a non-stationary random signal generated by air shock in the
welding process. It results from the energy change of welding arc. It has an accurate
and sensitive corresponding relationship to the change of welding quality and the
dynamic state of weld pool. According to different welding method, the generation
mechanisms of arc acoustic signal are different due to the different welding heat
sources. The analysis method of arc acoustic signal should be imparity from each
other.
At present, welding heat sources can be divided into several categories, including
heat and pressure, and so on. Among them, the arc energy is the main source for
arc welding method. For different welding methods, it is difficult to directly use
the same signal processing method to evaluate the welding quality online. For the
arc welding, there are two types of welding technology. One is called penetrating
welding method, including laser welding and plasma arc welding. Owing to the
high heat concentration in the welding process, a small hole will form during the
welding process, and the arc sound signal will have a significant change during
the penetration. It makes it easier to recognize the acoustic signal, so the research
on real-time monitoring of welding penetration status based on sound signal has

been accomplished well. The second one is called arc welding, such as argon arc
welding and gas metal arc welding. Because the energy is not as concentrated as
laser welding, there is no obvious characteristic change of arc acoustic signal. The
acoustic signal is generally produced by welding arc, so it is called arc sound signal.
Most of the researches focused on the feature extraction and modeling, which were
used to predict and identify the dynamic changes of welding process [13, 14]. There
is no evidence that real-time welding quality monitoring based on arc sound signal
has been realized. That is the problem which has been tried to be solved in this
monograph.
1.4 Feature and Application Value of Arc Sound Signal
The welding process itself is a heating process, which contains the vibrating plasma
atmosphere and the vibration inside the liquid pool. As the rapidly changing signals
generally have a lot of inertia, it is necessary to analyze the signal statistics to get its
signal distribution. It can be seen from previous studies that arc signal is a nonlinear
time-varying vibration signal, and its statistical analysis pays more attention to its
physical significance. The arc sound signal is closely related to the stability of welding
arc. The factors affecting the arc stability include the changes of welding parameters
and the type of weld droplet transition, which can be reflected by the arc sound signal.
The application research of arc sound signal has been accomplished for many
years, involving the analysis of sound source, the analysis of the relationship between
arc sound signal and welding spatter and welding parameters. Most of the studies
divided the sound signal into pulse signal and disturbance signal in the research of
establishing the recognition model for welding quality based on arc sound signal,
such as Refs. [15, 16]. The transfer function of peak current and arc sound signal was
established. It is found that the pulse signal comes from the short circuit between
the electrode and the parent material, and some splashes impact the molten pool.
The molten metal will detonate from the electrode. The sudden ignition of the arc
causes a sharp rise in the temperature and expansion of the surrounding protective
gas, which causes the vibration of the surrounding gas. The disturbance signal mainly
comes from the arc explosion and molten pool variation in physical and geometric
dimensions. In a word, the application research of arc sound signal is to realize the
real-time monitoring for welding process quality.
1.5 Influencing Factor of Arc Sound Signal
The sound itself is a kind of mechanical wave. The arc sound signal during welding
process is similar to the oscillating waveform in view of its welding characteristics.
During the GTAW welding process, the pulsation of plasma flow between tungsten
1.5 Influencing Factor of Arc Sound Signal 5
electrode and welding workpiece, and the intrinsic vibration frequency of molten
pool will be diffused out in the form of sound waves. The plasma flow inside the arc
itself is the basic sound source to generate vibration. When the motion of the vibration
source causes the particles in the surround arc atmosphere to deviate from their normal
position and spread from near to far, the arc sound signal waveform is finally formed.
From the perspective of arc energy, arc sound formation is a phenomenon that a part
of the mechanical vibration energy generated by sound source is propagated by the
elastic medium around it in the way of wave; that is, the process of transforming
mechanical energy into acoustic energy. In view of its mechanism, the arc sound
signal has a significant correspondence with the changes of various parameters and
dynamic characteristics in the welding process.
At present, the research scope of arc sound signal on the dynamic information
change during welding process mainly includes the influence of welding process
parameters, such as welding voltage, arc, welding speed, type and speed of protective
gas; and the influence of arc sound signal on welding arc length, welding spatter
process change, dynamic deformation and defect generation. In many studies, the
relationship between arc sound signal and various parameters have been summarized,
such as corresponding relationship with welding voltage, welding current. As a heat
source, welding arc contains a large amount of plasma inside, which will generate
intense vibration under the action of high temperature to form the arc sound signal.
dV dI
S = K (I +V ) (1.1)
dt dt
S represents the sound pressure, V represents the voltage of the arc, the current
passing through the arc is labeled as I and K is the constant parameter.
Some scientists had studied the arc sound source model of TIG welding, the
relationship between arc sound signal and weld parameter, and arc length [17, 18].
The results showed that the arc sound signal could reflect the physical character of
welding dynamic process. It is useful in the welding quality monitoring via sensor
technology. Among the electrical feature of welding, the power of arc showed the
most impact to the arc sound signal and arc energy. It can be concluded from Fig. 1.2
that the arc sound energy could be used for the recognition of welding penetration
state.
1.6 Microphone Array Measurement of Arc Sound
The earlier researches of welding arc sound were using a single microphone. How-
ever, there are a lot of interference source in the actual welding production envi-
ronment, such as human and machine operation voice, and the background noise.
The collected signal is a mixed signal which is difficult to distinguish the effective
information from the noise information. Then the scholars came up with the idea of
Fig. 1.2 The relationship between arc sound energy and penetration state pressure
introducing the array into the welding process monitoring. Using the excellent posi-
tioning ability and independent source, separation ability of the microphone array
can make it easier to realize welding dynamic process monitoring.
The application of sound source positioning technology of microphone array in
industry [19, 20] is mainly reflected in the realization of robot’s positioning and
tracking of vibration source, as well as the noise detection of engines in automobiles
and motorcycles and large machinery. Among them, the robot sound source posi-
tioning and tracking is a very important development field. In the field of welding,
microphone array sound source localization technology is still in the exploratory
stage, the team of Prof. Luo Zhen from Tianjin University is the pioneer in this field.
Dr. Ao sansan used eight microphones to form an array with a structure of 2 × 4 to
collect the system, as shown in Fig. 1.3. Through blind source separation algorithm,
signal noise reduction and feature extraction were carried out for the laser welding
process.
According to the special environment of welding process, there are couple of
problems in application of microphone array sound source positioning technology
in the welding process: (1) the sound signal is relatively rough, while for the small
size welding defects, location is a delicate process; (2) the existing sound source
positioning algorithm comes from the communication field, and the signal in the
communication field is usually a single frequency, while the welding arc sound is a
multi-frequency and complex signal; (3) there are a few researches that studied the
welding sound positioning based on microphone array, and the positioning results are
relatively rough and need to be verified. Microphone array sound source positioning
is more common in the field of robot research, and it is relatively rough, and the
number of array elements is at least 8, and in some researches being more than 64;
1.6 Microphone Array Measurement of Arc Sound 7
Fig. 1.3 Schematic diagram of microphone array position
(4) the location of defects can be corresponding through the time axis according to
the position of signal mutation in the straight welding seam; the studied positioning
seems like not meaningful; however, it has research value for the complex shape
workpieces welding monitoring process.
Chapter 2
Acoustic Mechanism and Arc Sound
Source Modeling for GTAW Welding
2.1 Basic Arc Sound Source Model
In order to achieve the detection of welding defects, it is necessary to analyze the

mechanism of sound source generation [21]. The welding arc sound generation can
be divided into two parts: one is a semi-transparent near-conical cavity enclosed by
the protective atmosphere between tungsten electrode and welding test plate, which
is excited by the sound source generated by the change in arc energy, and then sound
source generation formed after the modulation of sound channel. The second is
produced by resonance of liquid metal under the action of various arc forces, surface
tension Fe , supporting force Fac , N, gravity Fa and shear force σ1 . The mechanism
diagram of sound source generation is shown in Fig. 2.1.
There are three sources of sound in gas flow: monopole sound source, dipole sound
source and quadrupole sound source. The welding arc sound source has been proved
to be quadrupole sound source because of the arc forces that lead to the turbulent
flow of air. The sound pressure of quadrupole sound source is shown in Eq. 2.1.
The arc sound source model can be divided into two parts [22]. The first type
model is generated by arc power, as in Eq. 2.2 (Fig. 2.2).
cfQb2
Fac = pd = cos θ cos(θ + 90◦ )e−jkr (2.1)
2r 3
Fac = UI (2.2)
2.1.1 Weld Pool Oscillation Model of Arc Sound
The second type of sound source model is generated from oscillation model. The
model between intrinsic frequency of the molten pool resonance and the size, shape

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_2
10 2 Acoustic Mechanism and Arc Sound Source Modeling for GTAW Welding
Fig. 2.1 The sound source model mechanism
Fig. 2.2 Quadrupole sound source model of welding arc sound
of the molten pool is derived by using the two-dimensional film wave model. Each
point on the membrane vibrates up and down in a direction whose displacement is a
function of time and position. Let the surface density of film be σ and tension is f ,
then the force in z direction will be
∂ 2u ∂ 2u
F Z (x, y) = f ( + 2) (2.3)
∂x2 ∂y
2.1 Basic Arc Sound Source Model 11
1 ∂ 2 u(x,y,t) ∂ 2 u(x,y,t) ∂ 2 u(x,y,t)

c2 ∂t 2
= ∂x2
+ ∂y2
(2.4)
Variables separation u(r, θ, t) = z(r, θ )e−iωt ,
∂ 2z 1 ∂z 1 ∂ 2z
+ + 2 2 + k 2z = 0 (k = ω/c) (2.5)
∂r 2 r ∂r r ∂θ
In the penetration state, the bottom of the molten pool is no longer supported
by the workpiece metal, and the entire molten pool presents obvious vibration. The
internal motion of the molten pool is more complex than that of the non-molten pool.
After full penetration of the workpiece, the aggregate shape of the upper surface of
the pool does not change much, so the arc force changes very less with time. The
gravity of molten pool increases steadily, which is consistent with the continuous and
stable heat source applied to the workpiece in the welding process. The supporting
force of the solid curved surface wall on the molten pool is opposite to that of the
other four forces. As the molten pool grows, the supporting force of the solid curved
surface wall on the molten pool decreases.
In the approximate derivation, the entire molten pool can be regarded as an equiv-
alent “thin film”, and the intrinsic frequency of the oscillation of molten pool in the
molten state can be directly obtained by using the membrane wave model. Similar to
the case without penetration, in the state of penetration, there are different modes of
molten pool oscillation, mainly as shown in Fig. 2.3, k = 2.405 ∗ 2/Deq = 4.81/Deq .
In fact, the width of the molten pool back is smaller than the front, and the
equivalent diameter Deq is given by Deq 2
= 21 (Dt2 + Db2 ). In addition, the surface ten-

sion f in c = f /σ should be replaced by 2γ , the areal density σ is replaced
by hρs , where h is the thickness of the sheet and ρs is the solid metal density,
mass equivalence of “cylinder” element. To sum up, k =
thus realizing the
4.81/Deq , c = 2γ /hρs , k = ω/c, f = ω/2π
Fig. 2.3 Pool oscillation

mode

γ −1
f = 1.083 D (2.6)
hρs eq
Thus, the arc sound signal is influenced by both gas oscillation effect and molten
pool oscillation effect. In order to inspect the welding defect, it is essential to extract
the effective information [21].
2.1.2 Analysis and Validation of Sound Source for GTAW
The arc acoustic signal of pulsed argon tungsten arc welding is closely related to
welding voltage and welding current. Further interception of signals around 0.1 s
and observation of their correlation shows that arc acoustic signals are composed of
periodic and two ringing transient signals, and the occurrence position of arc acoustic
signals is exactly corresponding to the rising and falling edges of welding voltage
signals. The results show that the acoustic source excitation of arc acoustic signal
mainly comes from the change of arc itself. When the peak current and the base
current alternate, the change of arc causes the change of arc acoustic. At the same
time, the welding power P can be calculated according to the welding voltage and
welding current, and the result is shown in Fig. 2.4. It is observed and more obvious
in the comparison between arc sound and power that the acoustic source excitation
of arc sound comes from the change of arc energy.
Figure 2.5 shows arc acoustic waveform in different short time areas. It can be
seen that in 4 s the arc acoustic signal alternates between pulse peak value and pulse
base value for a period of 500 ms.
For arc acoustic signals within 400 ms, the duty cycle of peak signal and base
signal is 1:1. Moreover, within 30 ms the arc sound wave is composed of peak and
base period which shaped like a ring. The distance between the two peak signals
period of 4 ms, and a large peak signal and another set of smaller peak signal for a
(a) (b)
0.5
Power P/(w)
Power P/(w)
0.4
0.2
0 0
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 40 60 80 100 120
0.5
Sound s/(v)
Sound s/(v)
0.4
0.2
0 0
0 5 10 4500 5000 5500 6000 6500 7000 7500
4
Sampling number x 10 Sampling number
Fig. 2.4 The comparison of weld power and arc sound in short time period
Fig. 2.5 The arc sound
Sound s/(v) Sound s/(v) Sound s/(v)

0.5
waveform figure in different
short time period 0
-0.5
0 1 2 3 4
0.5
0
-0.5
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4
0.5
0
4ms 9.625ms
-0.5
0 0.005 0.01 0.015 0.02 0.025 0.03
Weld time t/(s)
period of 4 ms, is spaced 9.625 ms. These peak signals occur at the same periodic
position, and each small period contains a small peak signal and a large peak signal,
which is not obvious in the base peak signal.
A section of arc acoustic signal sequence was extracted for cepstrum analysis,
and the results of cepstrum analysis of arc acoustic signal were shown in Fig. 2.6. As
can be seen from the results, after cepstrum analysis, obvious periodic characteristics
could be seen, with peak values of 14, 29, 44 and 59 ms. A series of peaks occurred
nearby, and the time interval between the two peaks was 15 ms. Since the cycle was
15 ms, the frequency was 1/cycle = 66.67, approximately 70 Hz, indicating that
these small excitation signals were consistent with the welding frequency.
In view of the pitch period estimation results, this series of peaks is the pulsed
current excited by the sound. When amplifying cepstrum signal, it is found that except
the peak value represented by the pulse current, there is no periodic repetition, which
indicates that there are no other obvious harmonics in the sound signal except the
(a) (b)
Amplitude f/(v)
Sound s/(v)
0.5 2
0 1
-0.5
0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 0 1 2 3 4
Sampling number x 10
6 Frequency Fs/(Hz) x 10
4
Amplitude f/(v)
0.1 0.2
Amplitude f/(v)
44ms
14ms 29ms 14ms 29ms 59ms
0.05 59ms 0.1 44ms
0 0
0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1 0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1
Time t/(s) Time t/(s)
Fig. 2.6 The comparison of the cepstral analysis with sound pressure and DCT frequency feature.
a the cepstral feature and sound pressure, b the cepstral and DCT feature
harmonic of the current sound, indicating that the excitation mechanism of the sound
signal by the molten pool oscillation is different from the current. This means that
the sound produced by the pool oscillation may not be in the form of a fundamental
frequency multiple of its intrinsic frequency, but in some single frequency [23].
2.1.3 Influence of Welding Parameters on Arc Sound Signal

During Dynamic Welding
Sound itself is a kind of mechanical wave, and for the sound signal in the welding
process due to its welding characteristics, there is also a wave of oscillation. For
the GTAW welding process, the plasma pulsation between the tungsten electrode
and the welding workpiece and the intrinsic vibration frequency of the weld pool
will be diffused in the form of sound waves. The plasma flow in the arc itself is the
basic sound source that generates vibration. When the motion of the vibration source
causes the particles in the surrounding arc atmosphere to deviate from the normal
position and spread from near to far, the arc acoustic signal waveform is eventually
formed. From the perspective of arc energy, arc acoustic formation is a phenomenon
that part of the mechanical vibration generated by the sound source is propagated out
by the elastic medium around it by means of waves, that is, the mechanical energy
is transformed into acoustic energy. In view of its mechanism, arc acoustic signal
has a significant relationship with the variation of various parameters and dynamic
characteristics during welding process.
The research on the influence of arc acoustic signal on the dynamic informa-
tion of welding process mainly includes the influence on various welding process
parameters, such as welding voltage, arc, welding speed, protection gas type and
flow rate, and the influence of arc acoustic signal on welding arc length, welding
spatter process, dynamic deformation and defects.
Many studies summarize that the arc sound signals with various process param-
eters, such as the corresponding relationship between welding voltage and welding
current, for different welding methods are based on arc as heat source. The heat source
produces intense vibration and the sound generates from the plasma arc change. The
arc sound signal has close relationship with the arc characteristic [23, 24]. The study
shows that arc sound pressure can be expressed as follows:
dV dI
S = K(I +V ) (2.7)
dt dt
Fig. 2.7 The relationship between weld speed, arc length and arc sound pressure
In the formula, S is sound pressure, V represents the voltage of arc, I represents

the current passing through arc, and K is a constant (Fig. 2.7).
Chapter 3
Feature Extraction and Analysis of Arc
Sound Signal with Dynamic Welding
Process
The welding arc acoustic signal is similar to the vibration signal. Different types of
feature extraction and analysis can be carried out according to the collection method.
As the audible sound was chosen for this study, the collected system and feature
extraction were done according to this principle.
3.1 Welding Operation System Setup
An automatic control system is designed for the welding experiments based on arc
acoustic signal fusion control of pulse GTAW welding process. The system is shown
in Fig. 3.1, which is composed of four parts: welding system; motion control system;
visual system and acoustic system [23].
Welding system: According to the characteristics of research object and relevant
requirement of experiment, the system mainly includes AC/DC welding power sup-
ply, wire feeding machine, control box, water and gas protection device. The system
could achieve the welding arc on and arc off through the control circuit and industrial
personal computer. Considering the further study of welding quality control, several
parameters should be adjustable during the welding process, such as peak pulse cur-
rent Ip , pulse base current Ib , wire feed speed vb and welding speed v. The peak pulse
current is the most effective factor for the welding penetration. The analog voltage
from 0 to 10 V is the output by the acquisition card. It is amplified by DC amplifier
circuit to realize the control of welding current and wire feeding speed, so as to
realize the communication between computer and welding machine. It is necessary
to calibrate the actual welding parameter with the analog parameters, as shown in
Fig. 3.2.
The results of calibration are linear characteristic. The linear equation between
peak welding current I and setting voltage U 1 is
I − 24.4
U1 = (3.1)
52.1
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_3
18 3 Feature Extraction and Analysis of Arc Sound Signal …
Welding
current
Arc sensor Control circuit

Host Computer
H
A/D
D/A
Step motor
Wire Feeder
Voltage
Conditioner
Ignition switch
Welding machine Microphone
Visual sensor
Motion mechanism
Fig. 3.1 GTAW welding system and sensing system
500 50
Wire feeding speed(mm/s)
Welding current (A)
400 40
300 30
200 20
100 10
0 0
0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 8
Voltage(V) Voltage(V)
(a) Welding current curve (b) Wire feeding speed curve
Fig. 3.2 The relation between the analog signal and welding parameters
The linear equation between wire feed speed and setting voltage is
Vf + 4.4
U2 = (3.2)
6.91
Motion control system: The specific motion control system is achieved by stepper
motor. The angular displacement is converted into planar displacement through the
3.1 Welding Operation System Setup 19
pulse driving form, and the output current driving mechanism is combined with the
driving controller to realize the motion in positive and negative directions [25].
Visual system: In order to study the generation and change of welding penetration
state, it is necessary to set up the visual sensing system from different aspects. A
three-way vision sensor is designed to detect the image from the weld pool, the arc
shape and the penetration state of back side [26, 27] (Fig. 3.3).
The hardware equipment includes digital WAT-902H HD industrial camera,
M2514-MP telephoto lens, Daheng CG400 image acquisition card and industrial
computer. After the calibration of the camera, the image is as shown in Fig. 3.4.
Acoustic system: The audio sensing system is responsible for the acquisition
of acoustic signal during the welding process. The arc sound signal of welding is
collected at 36 kHz sampling rate and 12 bits precision. It is picked by MP201, an
omnidirectional capacitance microphone, of which the frequency response range is
from 20 to 20 kHz, the sensitivity is 50 mV/Pa and the dynamic range is >146 dB.
The microphone is settled at 75° horizontal angle to the workpiece. The arc sound
Fig. 3.3 The visual sensing system: a The photograph of visual sensor, b light path diagram
Fig. 3.4 The image of

three-dimensional visual
sensor Front-end weld seam
Backside weld seam
Weld width
Weld pool
Table 3.1 Major parameters

Type MP201
of audio sensor
Diaphragm and canning material Nickel, nickel alloy
Open circuit sensitivity −26 ± 2 dB (50 mV/Pa)
Frequency response 20 Hz to 20 kHz
Polarization voltage 0V
Dynamic range >146 dB
Background noise <16 dBA
is filtered by MC104 signal conditioner which is steep dropping characteristics. The

major parameters of microphone are shown in Table 3.1 (Fig. 3.5).
The experiment is carried out using the 4 mm LF6 aluminium alloy for pulsed
GTAW welding. Three penetration states such as full penetration, partial penetration
and excessive penetration are designed for the same welding current and wire feed
speed. The welding penetration generally changes along with the welding speed.
It increases from 3 to 4.5 mm/s. Three penetration states are defined as shown in
Fig. 3.6. In order to establish the recognition model of three different states, the test
welding trials are implemented separately in three kinds of welding parameters, and
the welding speed is the only variant. The audible sound signals are collected during
(a) Microphone (b) Signal conditioner
Fig. 3.5 Weld sound arc sensor
Fig. 3.6 The classification of three penetration states. a Partial penetration, b full penetration,
c excessive penetration
3.1 Welding Operation System Setup 21
Fig. 3.7 The original audible sound of welding process
the three different welding processes. Because the test trial is trying to set up the
recognition model of penetration state, the influence of other factor, such as welding
current, must be ignored. So the test trials are conducted under the same welding
current.
The acoustic signal collected by audio sensing system is shown in Fig. 3.7. The
original arc sound is composed of pure sound signal and environmental noise. The
acoustic signal has pulsed characteristics just as the welding pulse. After amplifica-
tion of the data, it can be observed that there are two parts of data, such as pulse peak
value and pulse base value in each period. The pulse peak and pulse base period are
alternately changing at the same frequency. In addition, the quantity of pulse peak
data is equal to the pulse base, which is same with the duty ratio of 50%.
3.2 Arc Sound Signal Preprocessing Method
The original audible sound of three penetration states is shown in Fig. 3.8. It can be
concluded that the arc sound signal presents different shapes under different pene-
tration states [28]. Moreover, the maximum and minimum value of sound pressure
for partial penetration, full penetration and excessive penetration are different and
the arc sound signal of excessive penetration loses its pulse character because all
Fig. 3.8 The original audible sound of different penetration state

the acoustic signals had been affected by environmental noise and other factors. The
preprocessing should be done before analyzing the arc sound signal.
3.2.1 Removal of DC Component
The arc sound signal has DC bias due to the equipment of direct-current coupling
collection pattern. The DC bias will lead to zero drifting of signal conditioner. It will
affect the collection of the acoustic signal. In order to remove the DC component,
the removal is implemented as given by the Eq. (3.3):
s(i) = s(i) − mean(s) (3.3)
3.2.2 Noise-Removal Process
Besides the influence of DC bias, the acoustic signal is sensitive to many key factors
due to its non-contact way of collection. The acoustic signal after removing the
DC component contains the feature which could react with the welding dynamic
state and also the recombination noise. The recombination noise is generated from
welding source, circulating water tank, transformer and electromagnetic noise and
so on. These noises may cover the effective feature of welding penetration state. A
special denoising method has been designed to separate the effective feature from
recombination noise.
After analyzing the effective signal and noise signal of arc sound, it was found
that they have different characteristic due to its mechanism of generation. The envi-
ronmental noise is generally similar to zero mean Gaussian white noise, however,
the real arc sound signal is a kind of periodic signal where the energy is concen-
trated near the center frequency fi , and the frequency band fi is smaller than the
center frequency. The arc sound signal has different characteristic in the time domain
and the frequency domain. The environmental noise distribute in both time and fre-
quency domain during the whole time bucket. Because of the periodic arc sound
signal, each data appeared intermittent at time ti . The wavelet coefficient of real arc
sound signal will generate wavelet maxima module at ti /2j and the noise signal is
different from real arc sound. According to the above details, a new way of improved
filter-denoising method has been proposed which brings in the concept of sub-band
norm x∞ called “maximum modulus threshold wavelet packet algorithm”. The
algorithm flow is shown in Fig. 3.9.
(1) The arc sound signal is considered to be x(n), n e [1, M]. First, the Daubechies
wavelet is used to implement the five layers wavelet packet decomposition on
the signal, and the high-frequency and low-frequency coefficients are obtained.
3.2 Arc Sound Signal Preprocessing Method 23
Low-frequency
Acoustic Coefficients
signal Wavelet packet Reconstruction
Van numerical
decomposition signal
Preprocessed High-frequency
X van=0
Coefficients
Fig. 3.9 The process of wavelet packet denoising
(2) Calculate every sub-band norm on three decomposed layers and the average
norm within each layer.
(3) Find all the sub-band which is above average. Leave the wavelet coefficients
while the norm peak appeared along with the increasing of scale; if the norm is
below the average and there is no norm peak appeared while scale is increasing,
then the corresponding coefficients are set to be 0.
(4) The left sub-band still contains background noise signal, and a floating threshold
is set up based on the following Eq. 3.4:

2 log2 N
u= √ X (3.4)
N
(5) Then reconstruct the arc sound signal with the left wavelet coefficients.
The results are shown in Fig. 3.10. The processed signal presents fewer burrs
due to the removal of random non-stationary noise. The pulsed characteristic of
processed arc sound becomes more obvious. The fast Fourier transform has been
performed on three kinds of signal. Comparing the frequency feature, the frequency
Fig. 3.10 The analysis of noise signal

features of original signal exhibit no pulse character just like the noise signal. The
frequency features make average distribution in each frequency band for them. The
processed signal has obviously periodic pulse character and few burr between every
pulse signal. The noise-removal method could decrease the influence of environment
to the arc sound signal.
3.2.3 Region of Interest (ROI) Selected
After removing the DC component and noise of arc sound signal, the processed
signal directly showed the dynamic variation process of GTAW welding. The main
information lies in a few key areas and on the amount of redundant information
contained in the overall signal. The information will bring great difficulties in subse-
quent analysis. The concept of region of interest is widely used in image processing
which could extract the most important part and improve the efficiency of image
processing.
To select the ROI of arc sound signal, the special algorithm is applied to the arc
sound signal. The signal is collected by data acquisition card which contains D/A
value to communicate with welding machine. While the welding machine output
digital value 1, it means the current is pulse peak current and while the output digital
value is 0, the current is pulse base current. In order to select the arc sound signal
during the period of pulse peak, the data acquisition card is set to collect the signal
while the digital value is 1. The process is shown as 3.5:

1, x(i) ∈ ROI
s(i) = (3.5)
0, x(i) ∈
/ ROI
The extraction process is shown in Fig. 3.11. The final processed arc sound signal
is considered as the research object to achieve the online control of welding quality.
3.2.4 Window Function Addition
The arc sound signal is a kind of non-stationary random variation signal, which
changes along with the time, just like speech signal. It has stable frequency character
and physical character in a short time period. The processing of arc sound signal
is always based on short-time analysis. A fixed length window ω(n) is chosen to
analyze the arc sound signal and the window function continuously rolls over the
entire arc sound signal. The length of window is set to be a rectangular window with
size N. The definition of window is as in 3.6:

1, 1 ≤ n ≤ N
ω(n) = (3.6)
0, other
Fig. 3.11 The extraction of region of interest
Fig. 3.12 The 1.5

time-windowing process of
arc sound signal 1
Sound pressure s/(v)
0.5
-0.5
-1
-1.5
0 5 10
Weld time t/(s)
Oversize or undersize of window length will impact the analyzed efficiency.

Length N is set to be 5000 in this trial which equals to 125 ms. Proved by experiment,
this length is either too big to lose the information or too small to cover the effective
feature (Fig. 3.12).
3.2.5 Analysis of Arc Sound Signal in Short Time Domain
The most intuitive and effective feature of arc sound signal is time-domain fea-
ture, mainly focusing on the process analysis with time as independent variable.
The most typical time-domain feature is energy, average amplitude and vibrational
amplitude. According to Lv et al. [30], eight features are chosen for the recognition
of penetration state, including mean sound, energy, standard deviation, covariance,
root-mean-square, logarithmic energy, impulse factor and crest factor. The specific
equations are shown in 3.7.

−1
1 1
n N n
e= |Xi |; E = xn2 (i); Sd = n−1 (xi − x)2
n i=1 i=0 i=1

n n
(x − x)(x − x) 1
; RMS =
i i
cov = i=1
x2 ; Le = log(E) (3.7)
n−1 n i=1 i
√ N
1 N 3
N xn |x n |
FIF = Fpeak n n=1 n n=1
( 1n |xi |); S = 2 3/2 ;
N
1 N
n=1 xn − n n=1 |xn |
i=1
The feature extraction results are shown in Fig. 3.13. Four features could identify
the full penetration state easily; however, partial penetration state and excessive
penetration state are confused. The other features cannot identify the penetration
state clearly. It means the time-domain feature could reflect part difference of welding
process and other feature need to be extracted for the recognition of welding quality.
3.2.6 Frequency-Domain Analysis of Arc Sound Signal
As the vibration signal, frequency feature is also important for analyzing arc sound
signal. The traditional analyzing method of frequency domain is fast Fourier trans-
form. The discrete cosine transform (DCT) is similar to discrete Fourier transform,
with only the real part. It is twice the size of FFT and generally used in some
transformation which need moving the input and output in half unit. In general,
m-dimensional signal x could be discrete cosine transform as follows:
−1
2
M
π(2m + 1)k
x(k) = c(k) x(n) cos , k = 0, 1, · · · , M − 1 (3.8)
M m=0
2M
where
√
1/ 2, k=0
c(k) =
1, k = 1, 2, 3, · · · , M − 1
To analyze the arc sound signal, the DCT was performed on three penetration
states. The results are shown in Fig. 3.14. The frequency features are distributed in
the whole frequency band and the main information is focused on the 0 ~ 10,000 Hz
band. The maximum amplitude occurred at about 4000 Hz and the value is different
(a) (b)
250
0.09 200 Partial penetration

Mean sound e/(v)t
Full penetration
Energy E/(J)
0.08 Partial penetration Excessive penetration
150
Full penetration
0.07 Excessive penetration
100
0.06
50
0.05
0
0 5 10 0 5 10
Weld time t/(s) Weld time t/(s)
(c) (d)
0.18 0.03
Standard deviation Sd/(v)
0.16
0.025
Covariance cov
0.14
Partial penetration 0.02
0.12 Full penetration
Partial penetration
Excessive penetration 0.015 Full penetration
0.1
Excessive penetration
0.08 0.01
0.06
0 5 10 0 5 10
(e) (f) 15
Full penetration Full penetration

1.5
Partial penetration 10 Partial penetration
Log energy Le/(J)
RMS Xrms/(v)
1 5
0.5 0
-5
0
0 5 10 0 5 10
(g) 4
(h)
x 10
4
Excessive penetration 800 Partial penetration
Full penetration
Full penetration
Crest factor Fcre
2
Impulse factor
Partial penetration 600 Excessive penetration
0 400
-2 200
0
0 5 10 2 4 6 8 10
Fig. 3.13 The feature extraction of arc sound signal. a the mean sound, b the arc energy, c the
standard variation, d the co-variation, e the RMS, f the log energy, g impulse factor, h crest factor
Fig. 3.14 The frequency feature extraction of arc sound signal. a the partial penetration, b the full
penetration, c the excessive penetration
under three penetration states. The distribution of each band is different for three
penetration states. In order to find the penetration frequency feature, it is necessary
to choose the special frequency band for analysis.
Considering the density of distribution in every frequency band, the intensities
of three typical frequency bands such as (1.5, 3) kHz, (3.5, 5.5) kHz and (5.5, 9.5)
kHz are extracted and shown in Fig. 3.15. The intensity of each band is calculated
as follows:

b
ya = f (i) (3.9)
i=a
The results showed that the intensity of (5.5, 9.5) kHz band could clearly dis-
tinguish three penetration states. The frequency feature of first two bands partially
overlaps at the starting phase of welding. It is revealed that the low-frequency band is
sensitive to the environmental noise, so the classification result is not good enough.
The (5.5, 5.9) kHz band could distinguish different penetration state in the whole
Fig. 3.15 The feature extraction in different frequency bands of arc sound signal for different
penetrations. a 1.5–3 kHz, b 3.5–5.5 kHz, c 5.5–9.5 kHz
welding process. The typical frequency is chosen for setting up the recognition model
of arc sound signal.
3.2.7 Time–Frequency Analysis of Arc Sound Signal
As Fig. 3.16 showed, the distribution of sound pressure is different for time domain
and frequency band. The sound pressure is more concentrated at the low-frequency
band. Different distribution is exhibited at different frequency band. It is necessary
to analyze the penetration feature during special frequency band.
In order to refine the frequency band, a new way of wavelet packet has been
designed to get more information from different frequency band [30]. As we can see
from DCT distribution, the arc sound feature is distributed in the whole frequency
band. The energy is the most important feature for arc sound signal. It is necessary to
match the time-domain feature with frequency-domain feature and get the penetration
state on special time-scale quantum. The specific steps are as follows:
(1) Three-layer wavelet packet decomposition is implemented to the arc sound
signal and eight nodes will acquire from low frequency to high frequency. Each
node S3j contains the feature of arc sound signal and combining all the nodes
could get the whole signal.
Fig. 3.16 The feature distribution of time–frequency domain
(2) From the above analysis, the main frequency features are focused on 0–10 kHz
of arc sound signal; however, there are plenty of high-frequency information in
10–20 kHz. It can be divided into eight frequency bands corresponding to eight
nodes S3j , such as S30 = [0 ~ 2.5] kHz, S31 = [2.5 ~ 5] kHz, S32 = [5 ~ 7.5]
kHz, S33 = [7.5 ~ 10] kHz, S34 = [10 ~ 12.5] kHz, S35 = [12.5 ~ 15] kHz,
S36 = [15 ~ 17.5] kHz and S30 = [17.5 ~ 20] kHz. Then calculate the energy
of each node:
2
n

E3j = S3j (t)2 dt = xj (3.10)
k=1
where xj is the amplitude of sound pressure for reconstruction signal. E3j presents the
energy of each frequency band. A new feature vector is set up with energy features
as follows:
(3) In order to decrease the influence of extreme data, normalization is applied to
the feature vector as follows:
7
2 1
E=( E3j ) 2 (3.11)
j=0
Besides the energy feature, the tolerance feature Cj is also considered as the
effective feature. Assuming that the first element E30 /E has feature C0 , its tolerance
feature is C0 , the second element E31 /E has feature C1 , the tolerance feature is
C1 , in sequence the feature has been extracted in eight spectrum and tolerance
range. The Cj and Cj can be defined as follows:

n
xjk
k=1
Cj =
n
1
n
1
Cj = Kσ = K( (xjk − Cj )2 ) 2 (K = 3 ∼ 5) (3.12)
n
k=1
The results are shown in Fig. 3.17. The feature of full penetration always becomes
the largest one in every frequency band, which means that it is easier to identify the
good welding quality from bad welding using any frequency feature. Moreover, the
partial penetration and excessive penetration have the similar feature range: E3, E4,
E7, S3, S4 and S7 could sectionally distinguish the partial penetration and excessive
penetration. Thus, the frequency band features of arc sound signal are closed to the
dynamic process variation of GTAW.
3.2.8 Relationship Between Sound Feature and Penetration

of Weld Pool
In conclusion, the features from time domain and frequency domain are correspond-
ing to the dynamic information of welding process. In order to verify the relationship
between penetration state and acoustic signal, a set of flat plate test are designed in
two different workpieces. The different thermal accumulation effect is generated
from different shapes of workpieces.
It can be seen from Fig. 3.18 the original acoustic pressure waveform. The time-
domain waveform of acoustic signal is sensitive to the welding penetration state in
both dumb-bell plate and trapezoidal plate. The sound pressure increases gradually
when the welding energy is rising. The abrupt change of sound pressure corresponds
to the leakage position of welding workpiece.
The time-domain and frequency-domain features of acoustic signal are obtained,
as shown in Figs. 3.19 and 3.20. The arc energy has a relatively accurate corre-
spondence with the changing of penetration state. The variation corresponds to the
penetration state of welding workpiece. There is no obvious rule in relationship
between the frequency features and penetration state (Figs. 3.21, 3.22).
The time–frequency domain analysis of arc acoustic signals is accomplished in
both two types of workpieces. In the condition of partial penetration, the spectrum
distribution is scattered, with a little more low-frequency components and less peri-
odic trend. The frequency distribution of the full penetration state is uniform and the
Fig. 3.17 The wavelet packet energy and tolerance distribution at different frequency band of arc
sound signal. a The wavelet packet energy, b the tolerance
amplitude is large. For the excessive penetration state, there is more high-frequency
component, which indicated that the noise signal is significantly increased. Accord-
ing to the analysis, the main energy is concentrated in low-frequency band and this
part shows more sensitive to the penetration state changing.
(a) (b)
1
1.4

1.2
0.5
1
0
0.8
-0.5 0.6
0.4
-1
0.2
0 2 4 6 8 0 2000 4000 6000 8000
Sampling number x 10
5 Sampling number
Fig. 3.18 The sound pressure of arc sound signal in dumb-bell plate
(a) (b)
100 8
80 6
Energy E/(J)
Energy E/(J)
60
4
40
2
20
0 0
5 10 15 20 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
Fig. 3.19 The time-domain feature of arc sound signal in dumb-bell plate
(a) (b)
0.6
0.6 0.5
Amplitude f/(Hz)
Amplitude f/(v)
0.4
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.2
0.1
0 0
2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000
Frequency Fs/(Hz) Frequency Fs/(Hz)
(c) (d)
0.5
0.5
0.4
0.4
Amplitude f/(v)
Amplitude f/(v)
0.3
0.3
0.2
0.2
0.1 0.1
0 0
0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000
(e) (f)
1 1
(c) (d)
0.8 0.8
Amplitude f/(v)
Amplitude f/(v)
0.6 0.6
0.4 0.4
0.2 0.2
0 0
0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000
Fig. 3.20 The frequency-domain feature of arc sound signal in dumb-bell plate
Fig. 3.21 The

time–frequency domain
feature of arc sound signal in
dumb-bell plate
Fig. 3.22 The

time–frequency domain
feature of arc sound signal in
trapezoidal plate
Chapter 4
Channel Generation Mechanism
and Modeling for Arc Sound Signal
During GTAW
4.1 Generation Mechanism of Arc Sound Channel
According to the amplified figure shown in Fig. 4.1, the pulse characteristic of the
pulse GTAW leads to pulse-like arc sound signals. From the figure, it can be seen
that the positive arc sound pressure is larger and abundant than the negative arc
sound pressure. The image shows that the time-domain features of arc sound signals
during different penetrations are different from each other. The acoustic signal of
partial penetration is similar to that of the full penetration. They both have the clear
pulse characteristics. However, the excessive penetration gets a lot of noise during
the collection process. The reason why the signal of excessive penetration has more
noise had been discussed in various papers [13, 14]. It was found that when the
weld joint has been excessively welded, the material stability in welding joint has
been broken by the arc blow force. The sound source energy of arc sound signal is
unstable to express the feature of pulse exchange, and the deforming metal leads to
the generation of welding noise. The sound pressure of excessive penetration is also
less than those of the other two states, so the excessive penetration state is the most
easily identified state of the three penetration states. The time-domain waveform
shows the characteristic of the sound source for arc sound signal. This paper focuses
on the analysis of sound channel of the arc sound. The analysis about the sound
source of arc sound signal can be found in [30].
As we know from previous studies, the arc energy is the key factor for the genera-
tion of arc sound signal and the arc power determines the arc energy. This means that
the arc power should be reflected by the features of arc sound signals. In Fig. 4.2,
the sound signal and the differential power signal for one pulse cycle have been
presented. It can be seen that there are clear differences between the sound signals
(Fig. 4.2a) and the arc differential power (Fig. 4.2c). The arc sound contains lots of
noise (Fig. 4.2b) and the arc power (Fig. 4.2d) has a very clear pulse characteris-
tic in the time-domain waveform. It can be concluded from the frequency-domain
analysis that arc sound signal contains lots of formant and the formant distributes

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_4
38 4 Channel Generation Mechanism and Modeling for Arc Sound Signal …
(a) (b)
1 1

0.5 0.5
0 0
-0.5 -0.5
-1 -1
0 2 4 6 0 2 4 6
(c)
1
0.5
-0.5
-1
0 2 4 6
Weld time t/(s)
Fig. 4.1 The time-domain waveform of different penetration states: a Partial penetration, b full
penetration, c excessive penetration
in every frequency band. However, the arc power doesn’t have much formant in
frequency-domain analysis.
Thus, it can be concluded that the arc sound signal is not only influenced by
the changing of sound source but also affected by other factors. It can be assumed
that there is a modulating sound channel system that existed in arc sound production
process. The modulating sound channel is mainly determined by the formant of the arc
sound channel. The arc sound channel can be considered as a conical cavity covered
by shielding gas atmosphere between the tungsten electrode and the welding plate.
Its geometrical morphology and properties are caused by the behavior of welding
arc, protective gas velocity and density of medium. Changing of these factors could
impact the resonant frequency of the arc sound channel. The resonant frequency
could influence the frequency feature of arc sound signal, but some parts of frequency
information are reduced and some of them are amplified. It turns out to be the actual
arc sound which has been actually collected.
4.2 Arc Sound Channel Modeling Based on Cepstrum Coefficient 39
(a) (b) 0.8

0.4
0.6
Amplitude y/(v)
0.2
0 0.4
-0.2 0.2
-0.4 0
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0 1 2 3 4
4
Weld time t/(s) Frequency Fs/(Hz) x 10
(c) 2 (d) 6
Differential power dp/(w)
5
1
Amplitude y/(v)
4
0 3
2
-1
1
-2 0
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0 1 2 3 4
4
Weld time t/(s) Frequency Fs/(s) x 10
Fig. 4.2 The contrast of frequency feature between arc sound and differential power. a Arc sound
signal, b the frequency feature of arc sound, c differential power, d the frequency feature of
differential power
4.2 Arc Sound Channel Modeling Based on Cepstrum

Coefficient
In the process of feature extraction for speech recognition, a rectangular cepstrum

window is usually used to extract the feature of a sound channel, like cepstrum
coefficients. The low-frequency part is considered as the system function of sound
channel, and the high-frequency part can be used to distinguish the voiceless sound
and the dull sound. Cepstrum analysis is used for genetic testing and resonance
peak detection in speech recognition. Based on the above analysis of arc sound
channel generation, since there are lots of resonant frequencies generated in the
sound channel through the arc energy modulation, the formant also happens during
the process. Thus, the cepstrum analysis method is suitable for the estimation of the
characteristic of the arc sound channel.
4.2.1 A Mathematical Model Based on Cepstrum Analysis
In the processing of speech recognition, the sound is divided into two kinds of voices
according to different time-domain and frequency-domain features: they are voiceless
sound and voiced sound. The voiceless sound is considered as a linear time-invariant
system stimulated by a random noise, whereas the voiced sound is considered as a
linear time-invariant system stimulated by a periodical impact string. The arc sound
signal of a pulse TIG welding is a kind of vibration signal generated by pulsed and
periodical stimulation. Thus, it could be estimated, and the equivalent model can be
obtained according to the known mathematic model of the voiced sound. The arc
sound signal can be described as:
s(n) = p(n) ∗ g(n) ∗ v(n) ∗ r(n) = p(n) ∗ hv (n) (4.1)
where p(n) represents the periodical impact train, the period is Np, v(n) represents
the impulse response of the sound channel, r(n) stands for the radiation impulse
response during the sound spreading process, g(n) stands for the glottis wave, hv (n)
stands for the impulse response of the linear system during welding atmosphere, and
the * is the convolution calculation. And,

M −1
p(n) = δ(n − rNp ) (4.2)
r=0
So,

M −1
s(n) = ar δ(n − rNp ) (4.3)
r=0
The hv (n) could be considered as the convolution of the glottis wave g(n), impulse
response of sound channel v(n) and the radiation impulse response r(n). The model
of sound channel could be described as:
hv (n) = g(n) ∗ v(n) ∗ r(n) (4.4)
After the Z transform, it can be described as:
Hv (z) = G(z) • V (z) • R(z) (4.5)
The Z transform is used in the sound signal s(n), and the result is as follows:
∞
∞

−n
S(n) = s(n)z = ar z −rn
n=−∞ n=−∞
a1 −Np aM −MNp
= a0 [1 + z + ··· + z ]
a0 a0

M
= a0 [1 − ar (z Np )−1 ] (4.6)
r=0
If the pole zero model is used to describe the sound channel impulse train, then

mi
m0
(1 − ak z −1 ) (1 − bk z −1 )
k=1 k=1
X (z) = |A| pi (4.7)
p0
(1 − ck z −1 ) (1 − dk z −1 )
k=1 k=1
Deconvolution is the key method for analysis of sound signal, and also it could get
the impulse response hv (n) reflecting the sound channel. According to the complex
cepstrum analysis, the complex cepstrum of x(n) can be expressed as:
π
1
x̂(n) = X̂ (ejω )ejωn d ω (4.8)
2π
−π
Substituting the results of Z transform (4.5) into (4.6) and ignoring the negative
part, the complex cepstrum can be expressed as:
⎧
⎪
⎪ ln[A] , n=0
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ Ni
ckn
Mi
akn
⎪
⎨ − , n>0
x̂(n) = n n (4.9)
⎪
⎪
k=1 k=1
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ bk − dk ,
⎪ M0 −n N0 −n
⎪
⎪ n<0
⎩ n n
k=1 k=1
where |ak |, |bk |, |ck |, |dk | are all less than 1, so

ĥv (n)
is gradually decreasing as the
n is getting bigger.
For the arc sound signal, the pulse excitation signal and the complex cepstrum
are both periodic impulse string with interval period Np. It is difficult to clearly
separate the sound channel hv (n) from s(n) because they are convolutions between
the periodic impulse signal and hv (n) in time-domain analysis. They would have an
aliasing effect between each cycle. However, it is easier to get the sound channel
hv (n) in the complex domain because the convolution becomes addition between
hv (n) and the impulse signal. The periodical motivation can be removed using the
complex cepstrum window with a width less than Np. After the valuation coefficient
is calculated, the hv (n) can be obtained by convolution of the characteristic system.

The cepstrum window can be defined as:

1, |n| < n0
l(n) = (4.10)
0, |n| ≥ n0
The rectangular window will lead to the smooth information loss due to its special
characteristic like using the same threshold value for different frequency band signal.
A half sine function is chosen for smoothing which is small at both ends and big in
the middle. This weighted cepstrum window can be described as:

|sin(π n/n0 )|, |n| < n0
l(n) = (4.11)
0, |n| ≥ n0
Finally, the weighted cepstrum coefficients can be obtained, and the low parts can
be considered as a function of the sound channel system.
4.2.2 Cepstrum Coefficients Model of the Arc Sound Signal
The arc sound signal of the pulse GTAW welding is composed of sound source
incentive and sound channel system. The model of sound channel could be expressed
in formula 4.4. Sound channel is determined by the formant feature, and the formant is
contained in the spectral envelope. Thus, the key point of sound channel coefficient is
to estimate the natural speech spectral envelope. Generally speaking, the maximum
in spectral envelope is to separate the formant frequency spectrum. The cepstral
analysis is the most popular method to extract the formant feature coefficients. The
low time part of cepstral contains the main feature. Thus, the selection of a low
time window is achieved by cepstral analysis, and then the smoothed output signal is
processed using a logarithm function. This spectrum function is corresponding to the
resonant structure of the arc sound, which means that the peak value is corresponding
to the formant frequency. As long as the smoothed logarithmic spectrum peak of arc
sound signal can be located, there will be the formant coefficient. The flowchart of
cepstrum analysis is shown in Fig. 4.3.
Fig. 4.3 The flowchart of

cepstrum analysis Framing and
windowing IFFT Log
FFT Windowing Smoothing
Log |FFT| Formant

The results of cepstrum analysis for three different penetration states are shown in
Fig. 4.4. First, the cepstrum coefficients of different arc sound from three penetration
states were collected, as shown in Fig. 4.4a, c, e. The cepstrum analysis could sepa-
rate the impulse sound signal from the spectral envelope of sound channel formant
through the logarithmic and quadratic transformation. Based on the characteristic
of the cepstrum, the window is used for extracting the feature signal and achieving
the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) transform of arc sound signal. Finally, the dis-
crete spectrum curve was obtained. It could reflect well the dynamic features of the
resonance peak, due to decrease of the influence from the sound source excitation.
It can be concluded from the figure of cepstral coefficient and spectral envelope
during different penetration state in Fig. 4.4 that different penetration has different
formant distribution and special characteristic. The spectral envelope of the full
penetration state has the best smoothness and uniformity, the distribution of the peak
frequency is average and the stiffness of peak value is more stable. It is all because
the full penetration state is a stable and balanced state. In this state, the shape of the
weld pool remains unchanged which means the sound channel system is a smooth and
stable cavity. The spectral envelope is the more stable and periodic. Also, the spectral
envelope of the excessive penetration state has noisier sound signals. The noise
distribution is random, and the peak value is distributing without periodic. Because
the welding leakage and over collapse happened during excessive penetration, so
the sound channel system has been destroyed during the welding process and could
not have the resonant frequency. The partial penetration state has the least formant
in spectrum envelope. Although the curve is very smooth, however it cannot form
the resonance due to the partial fusion of weld pool. The semi-solid and semi-fluid
weld pool does not lead to the generation of resonant. Finally, it means the cepstrum
coefficient analysis could reflect the difference between different penetration states.
Therefore, the coefficient could be used to form the model of sound channel system.
4.3 Arc Sound Channel Modeling Based on Linear

Predictive Analysis
Considering the mechanism of arc sound production, the sound source of arc sound
signal is the variation of arc energy and the sound channel is generated by incentive
mechanism. Sound channel could be considered as a linear time-invariant system.
Sound source energy could change the loudness of arc sound signal via the shape
variation of sound channel and the signal will be influenced by the resonance of sound
channel. According to the frequency analysis, the arc sound signal contains all the
element of frequency band and each formant frequency lies on the morphology of
sound channel. The different arc sound signals are corresponding to a set of sound
channel parameters.
(a) (b)
z=rceps(y) Envelope Information in Quefrency Space
Amplitude f/(v)
Amplitude f/(v)
0.2 0.5
0.1
0 0
0 2 4 6 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
-3
Quefrency cep/(ms) x 10
-3 Quefrency cep/(ms) x 10
Log Spectrum Frame Speech Envelope
Amplitude fb/(v)
Amplitude fa/(v)
4 2
2
0 0
-2
-4 -2
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500
Sampling number Sampling number
(c) (d)
Amplitude f/(v)
Amplitude f/(v)
0.2 0.6
0.4
0.1
0.2
0 0
0 2 4 6 0 2 4 6 8
Quefrency cep/(ms) x 10
-3 Quefrency cep/(ms) x 10
-4

Amplitude fb/(v)
Amplitude fa/(v)
2 2
1
0
0
-2 -1
100 200 300 400 500 100 200 300 400 500
(e) (f)
Amplitude f/(v)
Amplitude f/(v)
0.2 0.5
0.1
0 0
0 2 4 6 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
-3 -3
Quefrency cep/(ms) x 10 Quefrency cep/(ms) x 10
Amplitude fb/(v)
Amplitude fa/(v)
2
2
0 0
-2
-2
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500
Fig. 4.4 The cepstral coefficient and spectral envelope of arc sound signal for three penetration
states: a The cepstrum and logarithmic spectrum for partial penetration, b the spectral envelope
for partial penetration, c the cepstrum and logarithmic spectrum for full penetration, d the spectral
envelope for full penetration, e the cepstrum and logarithmic spectrum for excessive penetration,
f the spectral envelope for excessive penetration
4.3 Arc Sound Channel Modeling Based on Linear Predictive Analysis 45
Linear prediction technique is a typical algorithm to estimate basic speech

parameters, such as pitch period, formant frequency, spectrum feature and cross-
section of channel function. The basic principle of linear prediction is based on the
digital model of arc sound signal and provides an effective algorithm to all kinds
of parameters. Moreover, the arc sound signal is very suitable for linear prediction
method due to its formant characteristic.
Assuming that the arc sound signal is s(n), n = 1, 2, . . . , n, the p order is the size
of sample for the linear prediction value. It is used for weighting and approximating
the next sample. ŝ(n) is the current forecast value of s(n), so

p
ŝ(n) = ai s(n − i) (4.12)
i=1
where a1 , a2 , . . . , an are the coefficients of linear prediction. The error of prediction

is presented as follows:

p
e(n) = s(n) − ŝ(n) = s(n) − ai s(n − i) (4.13)
i=1
In order to get the best prediction effect, a set of prediction coefficients

a1 , a2 , . . . , an has been proposed to acquire the minimum error of prediction.
Using the minimum mean-squared error criterion, the expectation of error square
E[e2 (n)] can be calculated. First the partial derivatives of the coefficient has been
accomplished:
∂E[e2 (n)] ∂e(n)

= 2E[e(n) ] = 0, k = 1, 2, . . . , p (4.14)
∂ak ∂ak
∂e(n)
Owing to ∂ak
= −s(n − k), k = 1, 2, . . . , p, we get the following formula:
−2E[e(n)s(n − k)] = 0, k = 1, 2, . . . , p (4.15)
and generate into the formula:
p

E[e(n)s(n − k)] = E[s(n)s(n − k) − ai s(n − i)s(n − k)] = 0, k = 1, 2, . . . , p (4.16)
i=1
Set the autocorrelation sequence of s(n) to be:
R(k) = E[s(n)s(n − k)] (4.17)
Because of the symmetry of autocorrelation sequence, we could get the following

result:

p
R(k) − ai R(k − i) = 0, k = 1, 2, . . . , p (4.18)
i=1
Solving this equation we get the linear prediction coefficients a1 , a2 , . . . , an .

⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
a1 R(0) R(1)· · · R(p − 1) R(1)
⎢ a2 ⎥ ⎢ R(1) R(0)· · · R(p − 2) ⎥ ⎢ ⎥
⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥ α ⎢ R(2) ⎥
Ap = ⎢ . ⎥, Rp = ⎢ .. .. .. .. ⎥, Rp = ⎢ . ⎥ (4.19)
⎣ .. ⎦ ⎣ . . . . ⎦ ⎣ .. ⎦
ap R(p − 1) R(p − 2) · · · R(0) R(p)
Then:
Rαp − Rp Ap = 0 is similar to Ap = R−1 α

p Rp (4.20)
The mathematical model of generation process for arc sound signal is shown in
Fig. 4.5. The excitation source generated from arc energy and random noise enter
into the cavity which is composed of shielding gas and arc, and this cavity is a kind of
nonlinear varying system. Then after the modulation of the filter the final arc sound
signal has been collected.
The synthesis influence of the arc sound channel modulation and the molten pool
vibration could be presented as follows:
q
S(z) G(1 − l=1 bl z −l )
H (z) = = p (4.21)
U (z) 1 − i=1 ai z −i
The formula has both pole and zero. According to the different rational expression,
the formula can be divided into three signal models such as autoregressive moving
average model (ARMA model), autoregressive signal model (AR model) and moving
average model (MA model). Theoretically, ARMA and MA models can be expressed
as infinite high-order AR model. Generally, AR model uses the common model of
Fig. 4.5 The digital model simplified diagram of arc sound signal
speech signal processing, so it is also chosen in the processing of arc sound signal.
Meanwhile, arc sound channel can be presented as:
S(z) G
H (z) = = p (4.22)
U (z) 1 − i=1 ai z −i
where G is the system gain, the LCP coefficients are a1 , a2 , . . . , an , p is the predict
order. The system gain and predict coefficient are time-varying parameters. If the
predict order p is big enough, this all-pole model could simulate almost all the sound
channel system. According to the principle of linear prediction analysis, the basis
of p linear prediction coefficient calculation is minimizing the mean square value or
output power of filter predict error. This error is called forward predict error power
Ep ,

p
Ep = E[e (n)]min = E e(n)[s(n) −
2
ai s(n − i)]
i=1

p
= E[e(n)s(n)] − ai E[e(n)s(n − i)] (4.23)
i=1
According to the analysis above, it can be acquired that −2E[e(n)s(n − k)] = 0,

k = 1,
2, . . . , p, and the second item is 0. Substituting it into e(n) = s(n) − ŝ(n) =
p
s(n) − i=1 ai s(n − i) the result is:

p

p
Ep = E[e(n)s(n)] = E[s(n)s(n)] − ai E[s(n)s(n − i)] = R(0) − ai R(i)
i=1 i=1
(4.24)
and Rαp − Rp Ap = 0. Synthesizing all could get the following:

⎡ ⎤⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
R(0) R(1) · · · R(p − 1) 1 Ep
⎢ R(1) R(0) · · · R(p − 2) ⎥ ⎢ −a1 ⎥ ⎢ 0 ⎥
⎢ ⎥⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥
⎢ R(2) · · · R(p − 2) ⎥ ⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥
⎢ R(1) ⎥⎢ −a2 ⎥ = ⎢ 0 ⎥ (4.25)
⎢ . .. .. ⎥⎢ . ⎥ ⎢ . ⎥
⎣ .. . . ⎦⎣ .. ⎦ ⎣ .. ⎦
R(p) R(p − 1) · · · R(0) −ap 0
In order to solve this p×p matrix, autocorrelation method is chosen to calculate the
linear filter coefficient, and it is Levinson-Durbin recursive algorithm. The process
is shown as 4.26:

i−1
ki = [r(i) − aj(i−1) r(i − j)]/Ei−1 , 1≤i≤p
j=1
E0 = r(0)
Ei = (1 − ki2 )Ei−1
aji = aji−1 − ki ai−j
i−1
, 1≤j ≤i−1 (4.26)
The coefficient can be obtained as:

p
aj = aj , 1≤j≤p (4.27)
aji is represent the predict coefficient of No. j for i order.

The results of linear prediction analysis are shown in Fig. 4.6. The figures show
the LPC spectrum diagram of different order and the comparison of p = 80 linear
prediction spectrum and power spectrum.
On increasing the predict order p, the LPC spectrum saves more details. It is not as
much good details as much predict order and it will bring more noise influence to the
judgment of sound channel envelope. The results show that the arc sound spectrum
has a pole at every 1000 Hz. Thus, in order to conform with the response of sound
channel, 80 poles will be needed, so p must be in the range of 70–90.
The simulation of three sound channel resonance characteristics has significant
difference via arc sound signal. The LPC spectrogram of partial penetration shows
obvious increasing trend and the number of peak is also increasing. This indicates
that the arc sound channel is in the forming process and the amplitude of each
spectrum band has various distributions. According to the analysis, the phenomenon
is due to two-phase, solid–liquid, of molten pool and the resonant frequency cannot
form. The LPC residual spectrum of reducing signal is different from original signal
Fig. 4.6 The digital model simplified diagram of arc sound signal
at low-frequency band. The LPC spectrum of full penetration has less error and
the envelope basically qualify the variation in arc sound signal to form the good
resonance. Moreover, the energy of each frequency band is basically consistent,
which means the arc sound has formed a stable sound channel system. For the LPC
spectrum of excessive penetration, the linear predict error is also small because of
the morphology damage of sound channel due to the leakage, so the oscillation of
molten pool disappeared. The energy of each LPC spectrum band is not uniform
and the amplitude of high-frequency band is much bigger. As above, the arc sound
channel of different penetration state is entirely different, so the feature of arc sound
channel could benefit for the recognition of penetration state.
Chapter 5
Prediction Model Establishment Based
on Arc Sound Feature Array
In order to accurately identify the different penetration states, the prediction model
should be set up via the multi-dimensional feature of arc sound signal. The artificial
neural network model is built based on biological nervous system. It has massive
parallel processing and the function of the distributed storage of various kinds of
data information. It is widely used in fault diagnosis, pattern recognition, associative
memory, complex optimization, image processing and computer field due to its strong
fault tolerance and associative memory.
Data acquisition and preprocessing
For establishing the prediction model, first preparation for the training data should be
accomplished. In order to acquire high quality of data, the measuring error, collecting
error, noise, pseudomorphism and other errors should be decreased before using as
input to the model. Since eigenvector group is a column vector it is composed of each
feature component. First, the calculation of the probability cumulative distribution
is complemented to every feature group. The results are shown in Fig. 5.1.
The results show that the probability cumulative distribution of these features
follows normal distribution and some of them has excursion at the beginning, but it
doesn’t affect much. In order to decrease the influence of the modeling process due
to the data, the normalization needs to be done to the training data. All the features
should be normalized to [−1,1] which could improve the speed at the network training
process. The specific formula is as follows:
y = (ymax − ymin) ∗ (x − xmin)/(xmax − xmin) + ymin (5.1)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_5
52 5 Prediction Model Establishment Based on Arc Sound Feature Array
(a) AMDF (b) Pulsed factor

0.997 0.997
0.99 0.99
0.98 0.98
0.95 0.95
0.90 0.90
0.75
Probability
0.75
Probability
0.50 0.50
0.25 0.25
0.10 0.10
0.05 0.05
0.02 0.02
0.01 0.01
0.003 0.003
350 400 450 500 0 5 10 15
Data Data
Mean sound Skewness factor

(c) (d)
0.997 0.997
0.99 0.99
0.98 0.98
0.95 0.95
0.90 0.90
0.75 0.75
Probability
Probability
0.50 0.50
0.25 0.25
0.10 0.10
0.05 0.05
0.02 0.02
0.01 0.01
0.003 0.003
0.04 0.045 0.05 0.055 0.06 0.065 5 10 15 20
Data Data
Mean strength
(e) (f) Log energy
0.997
0.99 0.997
0.98 0.99
0.95 0.98
0.90 0.95
0.90
0.75
Probability
0.75
Probability
0.50
0.50
0.25
0.25
0.10 0.10
0.05 0.05
0.02 0.02
0.01 0.01
0.003 0.003
0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 3.5 4 4.5 5
Data Data
Fig. 5.1 The probability distribution of arc sound features. a AMDF, b Pulsed factor, c Mean
sound, d Skewness factor, e Mean strength, f Log energy
5.1 Welding Penetration Recognition Analysis Using Arc … 53
5.1 Welding Penetration Recognition Analysis Using Arc

Sound Signal
BPANN is a typical multi-layer feedback network. It is widely used in pattern recog-

nition because of its advantages such as easy to use, less calculation and easy to
converse to real-time algorithm. In order to simplify the model, the feature group
should choose the test sample under the same welding parameter and divide into
three penetration states, such as partial penetration, full penetration and excessive
penetration.
In order to simplify the model, the training data are chosen for the same weld-
ing parameters and contain three penetration states [30]. A total of 39 features are
considered as the input to the BPANN model, such as mean sound, energy, standard
deviation, covariance, root-mean-square, logarithmic energy, impulse factor, crest
factor and linear prediction coefficients. A total of 118 sets of data are chosen to
be the training data, the input of BPANN is the 118 × 39 data group and the input
features are listed in Table 5.1.
For the recognition of BPANN, the layer selection, node selection and transmis-
sion function of implicit layer are important parameters for establishing model. For
arc sound recognition, four layers of neural network is designed which have two
hidden layers. According to Kolmogorov theorem, first hidden layer consists of 20
neurons and second hidden layer of 40 neurons. The structure of the artificial network
model is shown in Fig. 5.2. The input of j node on hidden layer is as follows:

M
neti = xi + θi (5.2)
i=1
Table 5.1 The input features of ANN

Mn En Xrms Le E131 … Penetration
state
#1 0.0321196 22.2065 0.0584499 3.10039 15.9561 … 1
#2 0.0401786 30.4695 0.0684661 3.41673 23.0535 1
#3 0.0477714 39.9787 0.0784255 3.68835 30.3720 2
#4 0.0437643 37.0382 0.0754863 3.61195 27.5369 2
#5 0.0438424 33.5916 0.0718884 3.51428 27.4626 3
#6 0.0462476 25.0538 0.0620841 3.22103 18.0637 3
…
#118 0.0333637 41.5319 0.0799345 3.72646 25.6304 1
10
1 11
2 12
E3,e 3 13
1
E4,En 4 14
2
E5,Xrms 5 15
3
E6,Le 6 16
4
E7,Fif 7 17
5
E8,S 8 18 Partial penetration
6
1
E1,E2 9
… 19
7 Full penetration
LPC,density 10 … 20 2
8
△ C1 11 21 Excessive penetration
9 3
△ C2 12 22
10
△ C3 13 23
11
△ C4 14 24
12
△ C5 15 25
13
△ C6 16 26
14
△ C7 17 27
15
△ C8 18 28
16
19 29
20 30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
Fig. 5.2 The network structure of BPANN

5.1 Welding Penetration Recognition Analysis Using Arc … 55
The input of k joint for output layer is:

L
netk = ωjk aj + θk (5.3)
k=1
where ωjk , θk represent the weight of output and threshold of k joint, respectively.
The responding output is expressed as:
1 1
yk = f (netk ) = = L (5.4)
1 + exp(−netk ) 1 + exp(− k=1 ωjk aj − θk )
The logsig-tansig function has been considered as transfer function, which could
solve the inputs with an infinite range and make the outputs in the range [0:1]. Other
parameters of prediction model are also confirmed by proof test, such as the training
epoch is 10,000 and training goal is 1e-6. A total of 39 features of three penetration
states has been the input of the BPANN model as the training data, and three output
data [1 2 3] are representing the different penetration states, such as partial pene-
tration, full penetration and excessive penetration. The training experiment under
different group data has been accomplished for five times to this BPANN model.
After training the neural network, the BPANN model has been established to achieve
the welding penetration recognition via arc sound signal.
In order to test the recognition effect of the BPANN model, first the validation
data 225 × 39 are considered as input to the recognition model and the penetration
states have been forecasted via the neural network; then the predicted value has
been acquired. The predicted value is compared with the true penetration state and
the results show a high recognition rate as in the Fig. 5.3. The prediction effect
is in disparity under different penetration states and the best prediction appears in
excessive penetration. The mean error is close to 0.025. The max prediction error
exists in the partial penetration state and the predicted value is 0.5005. The minimum
prediction error exists also in the partial penetration state, which is 0.0004983. The
testing error is much better than the training error, which can be observed from
Fig. 5.3 Comparison of predicted value and true value

Fig. 5.4 Prediction error of recognition model
Table 5.2 Prediction error of

Max error Minimum error Mean error
different penetration states
Partial 0.5002 0.0004983 0.0505
penetration
Full penetration 0.3757 0.0026 0.0699
Excessive 0.095 0.0038 0.025
penetration
Total 0.5002 0.0004983 0.0525
Fig. 5.4. The specific error in all kinds of penetration state is shown in Table 5.2. The
ANN prediction model could be used in the classification and identification of the
welding quality.
5.2 Prediction Model Using BP_AdaBoost Neural Network

for GATW Welding
In order to improve the forecast accuracy of the prediction model, a new prediction
model, BP_AdaBoost network model, was proposed. The structure of BP_AdaBoost
model is shown in Fig. 5.5. The superiority of this new model is to combine several
ANN models, which means to assemble weak predictors in order to get a strong
predictor. In this paper, the structure of 3-9-1 BP_AdaBoost model was used [31].
The forecast results are shown in Fig. 5.6. The prediction accuracy was improved to
be 94.3%.
5.3 Classification Model Using Hidden Markov Model 57
Fig. 5.5 The algorithm flow
BP network classification error

4 3
Prediction category
3.5 Real category 2.5
3 2
Classification error
Sample category
2.5 1.5
2 1
1.5 0.5
1 0
0.5 -0.5
0 -1
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Test sample Test sample
Fig. 5.6 The recognition result of BP_AdaBoost
5.3 Classification Model Using Hidden Markov Model
The original arc sound signal under different penetration states is shown in Fig. 5.7.
There are a lot of background noise and pulse noise contained in the acoustic sig-
nal. Therefore, it is necessary to extract the priority area which is corresponding to
penetration state. For acoustic signal which has sharp changes generated from arc
length changes, HMM recognition model can achieve classification of penetration
state. However, for the arc sound signal which has less mutation under different pen-
etration, the recognition model should be combined with wavelet packet transform
to get better recognition effect [32].
The schematic diagram of recognition model based on wavelet packet analysis
and HMM is depicted in Fig. 5.8. The wavelet packet analysis could detect and
analyze abrupt change of arc sound signal. It is used to extract the local information
of identification signal. In the high signal-to-noise ratio, HMM can make a higher
accuracy of recognition effect because HMM is achieved at time domain. However,
Fig. 5.7 The original arc 1.5

sound signal
1
Arc sound pressure s(v)

0.5
-0.5
-1
-1.5
0 1 2 3 4
5
Sample point x 10
Wavelet module
Input arc
sound signal
Wavelet Threshold Coefficient
Decompositon segmentation reconstruction
Feature Vector Recogniton Identify

Preprocessing HCopy
(.mfcc) (Hvite) results
Configuration Script File Network Dictionary HMMs
Fig. 5.8 The schematic diagram of recognition model
the parameters of HMM is more sensitive to training environment in low signal-to-

noise ratio. It will influence the rate of recognition. It is necessary to combine the
wavelet analysis with HMM to extract the most effective information from arc sound
signal for modeling.
5.3.1 Wavelet Analysis
Considering that there are both high-frequency and low-frequency information in

the original arc sound signal, it is necessary to design a way of extracting interested
information at different frequency bands. For this purpose of extracting effective
information from arc sound signal, the wavelet transform is chosen for preprocessing
the input of recognition model. The schematic diagram of wavelet analysis is shown
in Fig. 5.9.
Low
frequency
detail
Original Processed Wavelet
Forced denoising Final signal
signal signal resolve
High High
frequency frequency
detail coefficent
=0
Fig. 5.9 Schematic diagram of wavelet analysis
The procedure is as follows: First, wavelet decomposition. The one-dimensional

discrete wavelet transform was used to resolve the arc sound signals, and to extract
the high-frequency and low-frequency coefficient.
N −1
−j
W f (j, k) = 2 / 2 f (n)ψ(2−j n − K) (5.5)
n=0
W f (j, k) is the wavelet coefficient. Daubechies wavelet was used to analyze the
sampling points in three layers of wavelet decomposition of arc sound signal. The
decomposition wavelet is “db2”, and the entropy value is decided by “Shannon”. The
structure chart of wavelet packet decomposition is shown in Fig. 5.10. The processed
signal can be expressed as:
S = A3 + D1 + D2 + D3 (5.6)
Considering the characteristics of arc sound signal, the effective information is

mainly focused on low-frequency part. The high-frequency coefficient was set to zero,
which means the high-frequency parts were enforced to wipe off. The reconstruction
of arc sound signal then was implemented through all the low-frequency coefficients.
After reconstruction of arc sound signal based on the adjusted coefficient of low
frequency, the audio files were converted into speech file with 10 kHz sampling rate
and 16 bits.
Fig. 5.10 The structure

chart of wavelet packet
S
decomposition
A1 D1
A2 D2
A3 D3
5.3.2 Modeling Based on Hidden Markov Model
The specific step of modeling for arc sound signal based on HMM is shown in
Fig. 5.11.
• Data Preparation: There are three kinds of samples like partial penetration, full
penetration and excessive penetration of arc sound signal. Each of data sample
had 12 “wav” files. So these 36 sets of input data were used as training data to the
model.
• Acoustic Analysis: The HTK software could not process the “wav” file of acoustic
signal; at the same time, it could not bear a large amount of data calculation. So
absolutely it cannot be used to analyze arc sound signal. The effective characteris-
tic parameters must be extracted for training and recognition. In this paper, the Mel
frequency cepstrum coefficient was chosen as the feature parameter for this HMM
recognition model. For example, the MFCC_0_D_A represents the Mel frequency
cepstrum coefficient, “0” represents the logarithmic spectrum energy, “D” repre-
sents the first-order difference and “A” stands for the second-order difference. In
this paper, in order to choose the best parameter, different feature parameters like
MFCC_0,MFCC_D,MFCC_0_D_A were used as the contrast sample. HCopy.exe
were applied to generate the MFCC file. The specific command is as follows:
– HCopy –C analysis.conf –S targetlist.txt
– The analysis.conf stands for configuration file. This configuration files were
used to set feature parameter of MFCC. Targetlist file were used to indicate the
source of data and the path of feature output.
• Initialization: Training and modeling: In this thesis, three penetration state events
need three different HMM model, namely “partial penetration”, “full penetration”
and “excessive penetration”. It is necessary to choose the suitable model to improve
Fig. 5.11 The modeling

process of HMM
(a) 6 state with interaction across
(b) 5 state with interaction across (c) 5 state without interaction across
Fig. 5.12 The basic structure of HMM model
the recognition rate. The structure of six states with interaction across was used
for three kinds of HMM model. The three basic structures are shown in Fig. 5.12.
• In the Fig. 5.12a, there are four “activity” states {S2, S3, S4, S5} in HMM model.
The S1 and S6 stand for the start and end state, which is not a divergent state; it
is only used for conducting some function in HTK. In our experiment, different
structure model are contrasted to get the best recognition effect.
• In order to make the training algorithm more accurate and convergent, the HMM
model parameters must be correctly initialized according to the training data before
recognition. Both HIint.exe and HCompv.exe are used to initialize the input sam-
ple. The “HInit” command is used to initialize the HMM model by Viterbi algo-
rithm through the time axis of training data. The “HCompv” command is used to
smooth the initialization result of the model. Then “HRest” command is used to
train the model. The specific command is as follows:
– HRest –S trainlist.txt –M model/hmmi –H vFloors –H model/hmmi-1 name-
ofhmm
– Here the “hmmi” stands for the directory of output, “hmmi-1” stands for the
current directory of input. “nameofhmm” represents the name of training model.
In this paper, the name of training model refers to “partial penetration”, “full
penetration” and “excessive penetration”. The result of training will be more
accurate with more iteration of the HMM model. It will be more accurately
approximated to the best sequence of given observation sequence. In this paper,
three times of iteration were conducted to three kinds of HMM model.
• Model Recognition and Result Analysis: After preprocessing, extracting of feature
and iteration of input data, three different models like hmm-partial penetration,
hmm-full penetration and hmm-excessive penetration were unified in one model.

Then the “HVite” command was used for identification:
HVite –H hmmdef.mmf –i reco.mlf –w net.slf dict.txt –S trainlistnew.mfcc
The identification results are shown in Fig. 5.13. Each row corresponds to one pen-
etration state, and it exhibited the start and end time with unit for 100 ns, including
the logarithmic likelihood probability. Finally, according to the “HResults” com-
mand from HTK software, the predicted value was contrasted to the true value in
order to obtain the accuracy and precision of the recognition model. The results
of HMM model based on MFCC_0_D_A are shown in Fig. 5.14.
Fig. 5.13 The identification

results of HMM model based
on MFCC_0_D_
Fig. 5.14 The recognition rate of HMM model based on MFCC_0
• The “SENT” on first line represents the correct recognition rate of voice sentence,
the “WORD” on second line stands for correct recognition rate of word. For
welding acoustic signal, they are standing for an overall recognition rate for a
kind of penetration state and a special recognition rate of every single sample
in each class of penetration. For the model based on MFCC_0_D_A, the correct
recognition rate was 87.5%. Comparing the correct recognition rate of model
based on MFCC_0 and MFCC_D, the model based on MFCC_0_D_A got the
most highest recognition rate, and the recognition rate of MFCC_0 only reached
to 62.96%. The model based on MFCC_D was much higher and reached 87.50%.
The results are shown in Figs. 5.15 and 5.16.
The results showed that along with the changing parameter type, the recogni-
tion rate of no difference function was the worst. The recognition rate of first-order
difference function was lower than the second-order, and it was evident that the differ-
ence function had really increased the dynamic adaption of Mel frequency cepstrum
coefficient. This also improved the recognition rate. Of course, with the increasing
difference order, the influence of difference order number became smaller. While
the difference order number got three orders, the recognition rate would be equal to
Fig. 5.15 The recognition rate of HMM model based on MFCC_D

Fig. 5.16 The recognition rate of HMM model based on MFCC_0_D_A
Table 5.3 The recognition results of different model

Parameter type State type Number of state Recognition rate
1 MFCC_0 Cross 6 62.96
2 MFCC_0_D Cross 6 87.50
3 MFCC_0_D_A Cross 6 95.83
4 MFCC_0_D_A Cross 5 88.45
5 MFCC_0_D_A No cross 6 86.29
the second-order’s identification rate. Therefore, it was good enough to use second-
order difference function for welding arc sound signal in order to reduce operation
or improve recognition rate.
The recognition result of different models was shown in Table 5.3. For the state
type, the identification rate with cross-state type was higher than the model without
cross-state type. It was clear that the complication of state type could improve the
identification rate. However, considering the efficiency and practical, the use of cross-
state type is appropriate for analysis of arc sound signal. The number of states was
also important for HMM model. Along with the increase in the number of penetration
states, the identification rate also increased. For the special arc sound signal, it was
enough to use six states to set up the HMM model. The correct recognition rate could
reach over 85%. According to all of the above, the identification model between pen-
etration state and arc sound signal based on hidden Markov model could accurately
realize the welding process for different penetration state, like partial penetration,
full penetration and excessive penetration.
5.3.3 Comparing with Traditional Model
In order to prove the effect of “wavelet analysis + HMM” recognition model, the con-
trast between the new model with traditional HMM model had been done under the
same welding condition. For the traditional HMM model, the data was processed by
data preparation, acoustic analysis, initialization, training, modeling and recognition.

The result of traditional HMM model was shown in Figs. 5.17 and 5.18.
The result of comparing the new model with traditional HMM model showed
that the traditional HMM model could identify different penetration states through
Fig. 5.17 The identification

results of traditional HMM
model
Fig. 5.18 The identification rate of traditional HMM model
Table 5.4 The contrast of recognition results

Parameter type State type Number of state Recognition rate
New Model MFCC_0_D_A Cross 6 95.83
Tradi Model MFCC_0_D_A Cross 6 87.67
arc sound signal. However, it was less accurate than new model based on wavelet
analysis and HMM model. The specific contrasting results were shown in Table 5.4.
This is a new way of processing the arc sound signal and was proved to be effective
and suitable for analyzing and online monitoring of welding process.
Chapter 6
Relationship Modeling Between Weld
Pool Collapse and Welding Penetration
Based on Analyzing Arc Sound Features
A lot of research has been conducted on the relationship between acoustic signal
and welding process. However, most of them are focused on extracting penetration
feature and weld quality of acoustic signal. They barely consider the surface height
control of welding pool based on arc sound signal. Considering the sag depression
has a great relationship with the penetration status, so it is essential to achieve the
arc height control through acoustic signal in automated robotic welding.
6.1 Welding Experimental Design and Arc Sound Signal

Collection
The experiment is carried out using the 4 mm LF6 aluminum alloy through pulsed
GTAW welding [33]. Special experiments were designed to achieve the online mon-
itoring of arc length and welding sag depression based on acoustic signal. The arc
length is designed to be changing in steps, like 3–4 mm and 4–5–6 mm. The specific
experimental scheme and parameters are shown in Fig. 6.1 and Table 6.1. To clarify,
the purpose of this research on arc length control based on arc sound signal is to
achieve monitoring of the welding penetration state. The study of arc length control
is only meaningful at a certain range on gas tungsten arc welding process. This paper
sets the arc length range to be [3, 7] mm, because it will not get a stable welding
process if the arc length is too long or too short.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_6
68 6 Relationship Modeling Between Weld Pool Collapse …
Fig. 6.1 The experimental

design scheme of pulsed
GTAW welding
Table 6.1 Experiment

Parameter type Value Parameter type Value
conditions of arc height
changed experiment Impulse 2 Polar diameter 3.2
frequency (Hz) φ (mm)
Peak current I p 180 Duty ratio δ 50
(A) (%)
Base current Ib 45 Ar air flow L 10
(A) (l/min)
Wire feed speed 10 Arc height 3–6 mm
V f (mm/s) (mm)
Welding speed 4.5 Material type Aluminum
V (mm/s) alloy LF6
6.2 Processing of Arc Sound Signal for Weld Pool Collapse
6.2.1 De-DC Component Processing
The original arc sound signal got DC bias caused by the direct-current coupling
collection pattern and zero drift of signal conditioner. The arc sound signal consists
of environmental noise and other noise. It is essential to preprocess the original
acoustic signal. First, the DC bias was wiped off by removing average method which
is as shown in the formula 6.1.
s = s − mean(s) (6.1)
6.2 Processing of Arc Sound Signal for Weld Pool Collapse 69
Considering the pulsed characteristic, the negative half of sound pressure is mainly
affected by the thickness and distribution of Al oxide film, so it cannot accurately
reflect the arc length changes, even the sag depression. On the contrary, the positive
half of sound pressure corresponds well with the arc length changes under the same
condition. It had more effective information and less noise. In order to get effective
information, the threshold is set as >0.2 V for acoustic pressure. The selected region
is shown in Figs. 6.2 and 6.3.
Fig. 6.2 Selected region of 1

arc sound signal Arc sound pressure s(v)
0.5
-0.5
-1
1 2 3 4 5
5
Sample point x 10
Fig. 6.3 Extracted signal 1

0.5
-0.5
-1
1000 2000 3000

Sample point
6.2.2 Denoising
The original arc sound signal contains many noises, which are environmental noise
and disturbance noise. The inevitable environmental noise mainly generates from
the electrical equipment like welding equipment and transformer. The pulse interfer-
ence noise is a kind of random signals produced by arc itself, influenced by welding
parameter and the high-frequency signal during ignite arc. The unstable arc is pro-
duced by alternating pulses. The pulse interference noise will disturb the actual arc
sound signal. Denoising method is aimed at removing the noise and extracting effec-
tive information from original signal. The wavelet packet transform is used to extract
rich non-stationary information from original signal. The moving average method is
used to eliminate the pulse interference from arc sound.
A new way of reducing noise of arc sound signal is proposed in this paper. The
specific procedure is as follows:
1. x(n) is the original signal, n∈(1,M), three-layer Daubechies wavelet is first used
to decompose the arc sound signal. The signal is divided into high-frequency
coefficient and low-frequency coefficient.
2. Choose the best threshold to optimize the coefficients both in high frequency and
low frequency of wavelet packet.
3. Reconstruct the arc sound signal with optimized coefficient, then get the
processed arc sound signal x’(n).
4. Select an appropriate window style and size “N” for x’(n) to smooth the data. To
proving the experimentation, N is set to be 100 as window size. The processed
signal of arc sound signal S’(n) is replaced by means of 100 neighboring points
like the following algorithm:

N
x (i) = S (i)/N (6.2)
i=1
S (i) = x (i) i = 1, 2, 3 . . . n (6.3)
5. By that analogy, the new processed arc sound signal S’(n) is generated with the
same length of original signal but with less noise in it.
The results of different denoising algorithms are shown in Fig. 6.4. It concludes
from the results that: (a) different denoising method has favorable denoising effect
on account of specific noise. The wavelet packet analysis is used to reduce the
environmental noise. The moving average denoising method is used to reduce the
pulse interference noise. (b) From Fig. 6.4b, c, it can be seen that there is less
environmental noise in pulse GTAW process, so the wavelet packet analysis is not
obvious than the moving average denoising method in noise reduction. The moving
average denoising method could remove more pulse interference noise in arc sound
signal. (c) According to special characteristic of arc sound signal, a new way of
noise reduction based on wavelet packet and moving average denoising method is
6.2 Processing of Arc Sound Signal for Weld Pool Collapse 71
(a) (b)
0.5 0.5

0.45 0.45
0.4 0.4
0.35 0.35
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
0 1000 2000 3000 0 1000 2000 3000

Sample point Sample point
(c) (d)
0.5 0.5

0.45 0.45
0.4 0.4
0.35 0.35
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
0 1000 2000 3000 0 1000 2000 3000

Fig. 6.4 The signal processing results of some denoising algorithms: a original signal, b the wavelet
packet analysis, c the moving average denoising, d the moving average denoising based on wavelet
packet analysis
proposed. The result of new denoising method is shown in Fig. 6.4d. It reduced the
environmental noise as well as pulse interference noise.
6.3 Accuracy Verification Test for Prediction Model Based

on Arc Sound Feature
6.3.1 The Piecewise Linear Fitting for Arc Length
Considering the arc volume variation at different arc length situation, in order to
improve the arc length prediction accuracy of the linear model based on arc sound
signal, the piecewise linear fitting method is proposed to set different prediction
model for different arc length variation region. The arc length is changed between
the range from 3 to 6 mm according to specific character of pulse GTAW. It is divided
into two linear prediction models of 3–4 mm and 4–5–6 mm arc length. Different arc
heights correspond to different linear fitting coefficients. The prediction accuracy has
(a) (b)
0.5 0.5

0.45 0.45
0.4 0.4
0.35 0.35
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 0 1000 2000 3000 4000
(c) (d)
0.5 0.5
0.45 Arc sound pressure s(v) 0.45

0.4 0.4
0.35 0.35 s=0.0460h+0.1075
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 3 3.5 4

Sample point Arc length h(mm)
Fig. 6.5 The linear fitting process when the arc height is changed from 3 to 4 mm: a extracted arc
sound signal, b the moving average denoising based on wavelet packet analysis, c the linear fitting
result, d the final relational model between the arc height and the arc sound pressure
improved. The linear fitting results of 3–4 mm model are shown in Fig. 6.5. After the
denoising and linear analyzing, the linear model between arc height and arc sound
is expressed as s = 0.046h + 0.1075.
In order to make the linear model more adaptable, same procedures are imple-
mented several times under the same condition. The average of each coefficient is
set to be the final linear model, like s = 0.04045h + 0.12445. The results are shown
in Fig. 6.6.
The fitting results of 4–5–6 mm linear model are shown in Figs. 6.7 and 6.8. The
final linear model is s = 0.0119h + 0.2173.
6.3.2 Validation of Arc Length Prediction Model
In order to verify the piecewise linear fitting effect, the prediction models are used
to forecast the arc length via arc sound signal. The proof test is implemented to
verify the prediction accuracy of the piecewise linear model, in which the arc length
6.3 Accuracy Verification Test for Prediction Model Based on Arc … 73
(a) (b)
0.5 0.5

0.45 0.45
0.4 0.4
0.35 s=0.0460h+0.1075 0.35 s=0.0349h+0.1414
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
3 3.5 4 3 3.2 3.4 3.6 3.8 4
Arc length h(mm) Arc length h(mm)
(c)
0.5
0.45
0.4
0.35 s=0.04045h+0.12445
0.3
0.25
0.2
3 3.2 3.4 3.6 3.8 4
Arc length h(mm)
Fig. 6.6 The final relational model between the arc height and the arc sound pressure when the arc
height is changed from 3 to 4 mm: a arc height from 3 to 4 mm #1, b arc height from 3 to 4 mm
#2, c the final result of linear fitting
gradually changes to 6–5–4–3 mm. The original arc sound signal is first processed as
per the above procedures. The results are shown in Fig. 6.9b, c. Then it is divided into
two parts as shown in Fig. 6.9d, according to the variation arc length like 6–5–4 mm
and 4–3 mm. Different linear fitting models are used to predict different range of arc
length, using s = 0.04045h + 0.12445 to predict arc length changes from 4 to 3 mm
and using s = 0.0119h + 0.2173 to predict arc height changes from 6 to 5 and then
to 4 mm.
The prediction results and errors of different linear fitting models are shown in
Figs. 6.10, 6.11 and 6.12. It can be concluded that the prediction results have more
errors at the beginning of the welding process; however, at the end of the welding
process, the precision accuracy becomes more precise. By analyzing the welding
characteristic of pulse GTAW and generating mechanism of arc sound signal, the
larger errors are produced by instability of welding. Because the arc sound signal
is generated from air vibration in the sound channel system which is composed of
shielding gas and welding plate. At the beginning of welding process, the sound chan-
nel system has not formed a stable cavity, so the arc sound collected by microphone is
not accurate. As the sound channel is becoming more stable, the prediction accuracy
(a) (b)
0.5 0.5

0.45 0.45
0.4 0.4
0.35 0.35
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
0 2000 4000 6000 0 2000 4000 6000
(c) (d)
0.5 0.5

0.45 0.45
0.4 0.4
0.35 0.35
s=0.0138h+0.2062
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
0 2000 4000 6000 4 4.5 5 5.5 6

Sample point Arc length h(mm)
Fig. 6.7 The linear fitting process when the arc height changes from 4 to 5 and then to 6 mm:
a extracted arc sound signal, b the moving average denoising based on wavelet packet analysis,
c the linear fitting result, d the final relational model between the arc height and the arc sound
pressure
could be improved. At the latter half of welding process, the predicted value is larger
than the true value because of the collapsing of weld pool. The specific error value is
shown in Table 6.2. The final average error of linear fitting model is 0.580487 mm.
It is proved that arc sound signal could achieve the real-time control of arc length
changes in pulsed GTAW.
6.4 Prediction Experiment of Welding Pool Collapse
After the validation of the arc length prediction model, the piecewise model is used
to forecast the surface height as well as the sag depression. Prof. Zhang Yuming had
proved that the weld pool depth was related to the penetration status of weld pool.
The sag depression could reflect the weld penetration and also the surface forming
state. The testing experiment is designed to check the prediction effect of precise
linear model on forecasting the sag depression through acoustic signal [33]. The
6.4 Prediction Experiment of Welding Pool Collapse 75
(a) (b)
0.5

0.5
0.45 0.45
0.4 0.4
0.35 0.35 s=0.0100h+0.2284
s=0.0138h+0.2062
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
4 4.5 5 5.5 6 4 4.5 5 5.5 6
Arc length h(mm) Arc length h(mm)
(c)
0.5
0.45
0.4
0.35 s=0.0119h+0.2173
0.3
0.25
0.2
4 4.5 5 5.5 6
Arc length h(mm)
Fig. 6.8 The final relational model between the arc height and the arc sound pressure when the
arc height changes from 4 to 5 and then to 6 mm: a arc height of 4–5–6 mm #1, b arc height of
4–5–6 mm #2, c the final result of linear fitting
schematic of this experiment is shown in Fig. 6.13. L represents the arc height and
r represents the depth of weld penetration. The welding experiment is implemented
under the same welding parameters above; however, the gap between the two pieces
of weld plate is increased to make more sag depression during the welding process.
Also, the arc length is set as 4 mm during the whole welding process. The variations
in arc length generate only the sag depression of weld pool. The measuring tool is
shown in Fig. 6.13b.
The arc sound signal is processed by extraction and denoising method as explained
above. The results are shown in Fig. 6.14. It can be concluded that after removing
the environmental noise and pulsed interference noise, the acoustic signal has less
undesired signal and an uptrend, as shown in Fig. 6.14d. The range of sound pressure
is coincident to the linear model of arc length from 4–5–6 mm. The sound pressure
of this is implemented according to s = 0.0119h + 0.2173. The predicted result is
calculated as follows:
Arclength = L + r (6.4)
(a) Arc sound pressure s(v) (b)

1 1
0.5 0.5
0 0
-0.5 -0.5
-1 -1
2 4 6 8 2000 4000 6000 8000

5
Sample point x 10 Sample point
(c) 0.4 (d) 0.4
Arc height

0.35 6-5-4mm
0.35
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2 Arc height

4-3mm
0.15 0.15
2000 4000 6000 8000 2000 4000 6000 8000
Fig. 6.9 The specific scheme of arc sound signal processing under different arc height of 6–5–4–
3 mm: a original signal, b the extracted signal, c the denoising signal, d the final relational model
between the arc height and the arc sound pressure
10
Forcast arc length
Arc length
8 The error of arc length
The error of arc length h(mm)
-2
-4
-6
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
Sample point
Fig. 6.10 The error of linear fitting model for changing arc height from 4 to 3 mm
10
Forcast arc length
Arc length
The error of arc length h(mm) 6
-2
-4
-6
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000
Sample point
Fig. 6.11 The error of linear fitting model for changing arc height from 6 to 5 and then to 4 mm
10
Forcast arc length
Arc length
The error of arc length h(mm)
-2
-4
-6
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000
Sample point
Fig. 6.12 The error of linear fitting model for changing arc height from 6 to 5 and to 4 and then to
3 mm
Table 6.2 The error of

Error(mm) arc height Emax Emin Emean
prediction arc height for three
different arc height changes 6–5–4 3.66444 −6.006 −0.223254
4–3 1.46689 −0.976108 −0.580487
6–5–4–3 2.66444 −6.006 −0.580487
It means the predicted arc length contains the real arc height L and the sag depres-
sion. The results are shown in Fig. 6.15. The real measured arc length is gradually
increasing as the penetration state changed from partial penetration to full penetra-
tion. It is becoming smoothly when the penetration is stable to full penetration. By
(a) The geometric description of weld (b) The measuring tool forweld
joint pool depth
Fig. 6.13 The schematic of experiment for forecasting the weld pool depth
(a) (b)
1 0.8
0.7
0.8
0.6
0.6 0.5
0.4
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.2
0 1 2 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 5
4 4
Sample point x 10 Sample point x 10
(c) (d)
0.5 0.5
0.45 0.45
0.4 0.4
0.35 0.35
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
0 2 4 0 2 4
4 4
Sample point x 10 Sample point x 10
Fig. 6.14 The specific scheme of arc sound signal processing under 4 mm arc height: a the extracted
signal, b the denoising signal by removing environmental noise, c the denoising signal by removing
the pulsed noise, d the final relational model between the arc height and the arc sound pressure
Prediction arc length h(mm)

8
4
2mm Error
2
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
4
Sample point x 10
8
Real arc length AL(mm)
4
Penetration
2
0 50 100 150
Pulse number
Fig. 6.15 The comparison of prediction arc length and measured arc length
the influence of the accumulation of filler metal, the measured position of arc height
is a little higher than the true position, so real measured arc height is a little shorter
than the actual arc height of weld pool. The 2 mm gap is generated by the change
of penetration status. The measured arc length is below the 4 mm first. Then as the
penetration gets more deep, the arc length increases to more than 5 mm. However,
for the prediction arc length, because it is calculated through the linear model which
is setting up at full penetration state, it is not fitting the prediction model in partial
penetration. The prediction arc length is about 6 mm, which is more than the real
arc height. For the full penetration state, the prediction effect is more accurate than
at the beginning. It can be used to predict the surface height of weld pool.
Chapter 7
Real-Time Control of Welding
Penetration via Arc Sound Signal
for GTAW Welding
The arc acoustic signal of pulsed argon tungsten arc welding is closely related to the
penetration state of welding process, and is also closely related to various welding
dynamic changes. The rule can be obtained by feature extraction and classification,
and it is better to predict different penetration states. However, there are still many
problems from offline analysis to online real-time monitoring. Owing to the com-
plexity of the welding process, the real-time online monitoring of the fusion state in
the welding process requires that the model has a good robustness and adaptability.
7.1 Design of Real-Time Processing Software for Arc

Sound Signal During GTAW Welding
The realization of a real-time signal processing system consists of many related parts
and thus constitutes a system. The development of a real-time signal processing sys-
tem requires the following steps, including process design, hardware design, soft-
ware design, system integration and testing. The first step is to validate the algorithm,
focusing on full validation of all possible data types. From this point of view, this step
does not need the speed of the algorithm to be very fast, but needs the algorithm to be
able to adapt to the changes of a variety of conditions, where good adaptability is to
build a good foundation for the subsequent real-time processing system. Therefore,
a software system for arc acoustic signal extraction and penetration status identifica-
tion of pulsed argon tungsten arc welding (GTAW) is designed, which can be used
for algorithm verification of real-time signal processing and monitoring system.
In view of the realization of functions of each part and the influence of modular
design idea, the system is mainly divided into the following modules: data loading
module, data preprocessing module, feature extraction module, image processing
module, fusion state classification and recognition module and arc length prediction
and control module. The main functions of these modules are:

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_7
82 7 Real-Time Control of Welding Penetration via Arc Sound …
(1) Data loading module: Load files of welding process information, including
arc acoustic signal files and image information files, through the interface window.
(2) Data preprocessing module: According to the research in Chap. 3, the col-
lected arc acoustic signal contains a large amount of noise information, which seri-
ously affects the effective features. In order to study the correspondence between arc
acoustic signal and weld penetration state, it is necessary to remove all kinds of noise
information. Considering the real-time performance of the real-time algorithm, in
order not to affect the calculation speed, the envelope of the pretreatment module,
the DC component of arc acoustic signal, the arc acoustic denoising processing part
and the extraction part of the region of interest were included.
(3) Feature extraction module of data: Feature extraction function of arc
acoustic signal is realized. It includes all characteristic information mentioned in
Chap. 3, including time-domain characteristics of arc acoustic signal, such as mean
value, energy, standard deviation, covariance, root mean square, kurtosis factor and
skewing factor, and the frequency-domain characteristics, namely the arc sound sig-
nal frequency-domain amplitude value of the discrete cosine transform. When setting
up an adjustable switch according to the needs of the user we can choose a different
area of the arc sound signal in frequency-domain feature extraction. When analyzing
the defective welding arc sound signal, we can choose to have apparent change not
in frequency-domain analysis for the area in order to make the software has better
practicability. The spectrum characteristics of arc acoustic signal are also extracted.
The extraction part of arc acoustic channel parameter characteristics, as described in
Chap. 4, extracts the cepstrum characteristics of arc acoustic signals. Linear predic-
tion and analysis of LPCC coefficient characteristics and layer spectrum characteris-
tic parameters, and so on, are the parameters of fusion characteristics for subsequent
modeling of pattern recognition.
(4) Data of the image processing module: In order to further validate based on
the control effect of arc sound signal, we need an auxiliary information with more
intuitive judgment to identify the effect of arc sound signal characteristics. So we need
to use the image visual information for authentication information. This software
includes an image processing algorithm based on template matching, which extracts
the characteristic value of the back weld width from the collected image information.
The back weld width can more directly reflect the weld penetration state, and it can
better judge the recognition effect of the model by matching it with the identification
result of arc acoustic signal.
(5) Penetration status of classification module: Extraction of arc sound signal
based on the above multi-dimensional feature vector group, fusion state recognition
of recognition and classification prediction: in the fifth chapter research content,
the article mainly studied two kinds of model algorithm, including the BP neural
network regression forecasting model recognition part classification and regression
BP_AdaBoost neural network prediction model. The two kinds of recognition tool
can implement different parameters under the condition of the modeling process,
realize the recognition of the characteristics of different dimension penetration state
and calculate the identification error of the results. Considering the recognition effi-
ciency, the neural network model and SVM model have been established based on
7.1 Design of Real-Time Processing Software for Arc Sound … 83
Fig. 7.1 The feature extraction result of pulse GTAW arc sound signal
multi-information features. It finally achieved the fusion state recognition during the
automatic welding process.
(6) Arc length prediction control module: According to the analysis in
Chap. 6, it can be seen that arc acoustic signal has a linear relationship with arc
length and collapse under welding seam. Therefore, a predictive arc length control
module is designed in this software to realize arc acoustic signal preprocessing,
denoising and linear fitting. It can predict arc length by linear fitting formula and
calculate its corresponding prediction error. It also includes piecewise linear fitting of
arc acoustic signal and error analysis of the fitting results. The arc length prediction
part based on arc acoustic signal can predict and analyze arc acoustic characteris-
tic signals according to the requirements of users and the different types of data,
respectively, for the change in the first-order and second-order arc lengths (Fig. 7.1).
7.2 Arc Height Tracking Control Experiment via Arc

Sound Signal of GTAW Welding
Based on the above research, the control system of experiment is implemented by

Visual C++ 6.0. Figure 7.2 shows the specific scheme of experimental verification.
The monitoring of arc sound is implemented at pulse peak period. While detecting the
rising edge of pulse point A, the arc sound signal is collected after 60 ms delay. Every
5000 points x(i), i = 1, 2, 3 . . . n are collected in each pulse peak period. In order
to get effective information, a threshold value is set as 0.2 to extract the most relative
(a) (b)
1

T4=250ms Peak level
T4=200ms
T3=150ms
T2=100ms Background level 0.5
T1=50ms
U (V)
A B C D EF
O -0.5
t (s)
-1
Tp Tb
T
1000 2000 3000
Sample point
Fig. 7.2 The specific scheme of experimental verification: a the wave appearance of the welding
current, b the denoising signal by removing environmental noise
signal. The average arc sound pressure S (i) is calculated under 5000 points. Then,
the extracted signal is fitting according to the linear model of arc length changes. For
this experiment, the fitting is implemented based on s = 0.0119h + 0.2173.
S(i) = x(i) > 0.2 (7.1)
S (i) = S(i), i = 1, 2, 3 . . . n (7.2)
h 1 (i) = (S (i) − b1 )/a1 or h 2 (i) = (S (i) − b2 )/a2 (7.3)
Figure 7.3 shows a program flow diagram of arc length control based on arc
sound signal. After processing the arc sound signal, the deviation data and rectifying
voltage are updated every 500 ms. The PID controller is chosen for the experiment
on closed-loop system, and considering the complexity and dynamics of welding
process, different controller parameters should be proposed for different penetration
state of welding pool. So a new PID controller with segmented self-adaption is
proposed, which can select PID controller parameters automatically during the arc
length tracking process [33].
The formulas of the rectifying voltage are shown in Eqs. (7.6) and (7.7). u stands
for the rectifying voltage, h is the offset of arc length and K I , K P and K D are the PID
controller parameters. The specific calculation process is as follows:
First, while the offset is too small (|h(t)| ≤ 0.2549 mm), the rectifying voltage is
calculated by Eq. (7.1), which means there is no need to adjust the position of torch.
Because the error is too small to affect the penetration state of weld pool, so it is not
necessary to change the welding torch position.
Second, while 0.2549 < |h(t)| < 3.782 mm, the Eq. (7.2) is used to calculate
the rectifying voltage. The K P , K I and K D are 0.9, 0.3 and 0.015 in this paper,
respectively.
7.2 Arc Height Tracking Control Experiment via Arc Sound … 85
Start
Initialize Data&
Welding Parameters
N
Detect the
Rising Edge A?
Welding Parameters
Setting Y
Delay 60ms
N
Succeed?
Y Arc Sound Adaptive PID
Collection Controller
Arc on
Arc Sound Rectifying
Welding Sound Processing Voltage Output
Processing and Control
N
N
Arc off Deviation<0.2549
mm
Y
Y
End
Fig. 7.3 The program flow diagram of arc length control based on arc sound signal

t
u(t) = K P h(t) + K I h(i) + K D [h(t) − h(t − 1)] (7.4)
i=0
u is the rectifying voltage, h represents the arc length offset. With the adjustment of
PID controller parameters, u is readjusted to appropriate voltage value.
Third, while the arc length offset is above a certain threshold (|h(t)| > 3.782 mm),
the rectifying voltage is calculated by Eq. (7.3). Because the arc length offset is too
large to get a good welding quality, so it is necessary to adjust it immediately.
u(t) = K P × h(t) (7.5)
For the system, it also has an upper limit of 10 V which is the limit of data
acquisition card. If the rectifying voltage is over the limit, it will be set as 10 V.
⎡ ⎤⎡ K ⎤

t
⎢
P
⎥
⎣
u(t) = h(t) ⎦
h(t)h(t) − h(t − 1) ⎣ K I ⎦
j=0 KD
⎡ ⎤
t
= ⎣h(t) h(t)h(t) − h(t − 1)⎦ K (7.6)
j=0
⎧ T
⎪
⎨ 0 0 0 |h(t)| ≤ 0.2549 mm
T
K = KP KI KD 0.2549 < |h(t)| < 3.782 mm (7.7)
⎪
⎩ T
KP 00 |h(t)| > 3.782 mm
Based on the analysis above, two kinds of experiments have been designed to
prove the accuracy of self-adaptive PID controller. One is achieving the arc length
control while the welding torch is changing from 4 to 6 mm. Another is achieving
the arc length control while the welding torch is fixed; however, the workpiece has
an arch shape which changes the welding arc length.
The results of monitoring effect at two different working situations are shown in
Figs. 7.4 and 7.5. It can observed from Fig. 7.4a that the self-adaptive PID controller
could adjust the position of welding torch while arc length is changing from 4 to
6 mm. The adjusting speed is quick enough to maintain a stable welding process.
From Fig. 7.4b, the prediction error will vibrate between positive error and negative
error as the plate being arch shaped, because the original welding path is set as two
stable arc lengths. The prediction error is about 0.5 mm, which is good enough for
achieving arc length control.
In conclusion, the monitoring of arc length through linear model of arc sound sig-
nal can be achieved for real-time while regulating the welding process. The exper-
iment has proved that the arc sound signal is good enough for monitoring of arc
length, and is also capable of achieving the welding quality control through arc
length monitoring.
7.3 Welding Penetration Control Experiment via Arc

Sound Signal of GTAW Welding
After feature extraction and recognition of arc sound signal via BPANN model, three
penetration states have already been identified. In order to achieve the online control
of welding penetration via arc sound signal, a special controller need to be designed
on the platform of Al alloy through pulsed GTAW welding process.
The program flow is shown in Fig. 7.6. After the initialization of system parameters
and setting the welding parameters, the collection has been started along with the
welding process. As per the pulse characteristic of pulsed GTAW, the welding current
has the pulsed waveform, as shown in Fig. 7.7. According to the analyses above, the
7.3 Welding Penetration Control Experiment via Arc Sound … 87
(a)
6
Original welding
path
4
Arc length h(mm)
Actual motion
2 path
Deviation value
Deviation voltage
-2
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Sample point
(b)
8
Original welding Actual motion
6 path path
Arc length (mm)
4
Deviation value
2
-2 Deviation voltage
-4
0 50 100 150
Sample point
Fig. 7.4 The monitoring results for two different workpieces: a the flat plate of arc length change,
b the arched plate of stable arc length
2mm Welding path
Welding path
2mm
Fig. 7.5 The real product photo for two different workpieces
Start
Initialize Data&
Welding Parameters
N
Detect the
Rising Edge A?
Welding Parameters
Setting Y
Delay 60ms
N
Succeed? Penetration state
Output
Y Arc Sound
Collection
Arc on
Y
Penetration=2
Arc Sound
(full
Welding Sound Feature extracting
penetration)
Processing and Control and regression
N
N
Arc off BPNN
Current output
Y classification
End
Fig. 7.6 The program flow diagram of welding penetration control
(a) (b)
T4=250ms Peak level
T4=200ms
T3=150ms 1
Background level
T2=100ms
T1=50ms
U (V)
A B C D EF
0.5
0
O
t (s)
-0.5
Tp Tb
2.5 3 3.5
T 4
Weld time s/(s) x 10
Fig. 7.7 a The waveform of welding current, b collected signal of arc sound
collection should be implemented only in the ROI region, so the operation is set to
detect the rising edge A of welding current and collect the arc sound signal at 60 ms
delay. It will collect 5000 points each time during the pulse peak domain and then
the feature extraction and regression of arc sound feature have been accomplished.
The features are then fed as input into the BPANN model to forecast the penetration
state and the predicted result is compared with the standard penetration parameter.
According to the comparison results, three recognition rules of penetration state have
been defined as:
First, while the recognition result is in the range of (1.5 ≤ |state| ≤ 2.5), this
state is considered as full penetration and the welding current is constant.
Second, while the recognition result is in the range of (0.5 < |h(t)| < 1.5), this
state is considered as partial penetration and it is necessary to increase the heat input
to get more penetration. The welding current will be increased as follows:
I (t) = I (t − 1) + 5 (7.8)
Third, while the recognition state is in the range of (2.5 < |h(t)| < 3.5), this state
is considered as excessive penetration and the heat input need to be decreased for
maintaining good welding quality. The welding current is as follows:
I (t) = I (t − 1) − 5 (7.9)
While the prediction result is out of the standard range, the welding current
maintains the original value.
I (t) = I (t − 1) (7.10)
Based on the comprehensive consideration above, a new piecewise function con-

troller based on BPANN model is proposed to achieve the online monitoring of
welding quality based on the acoustic signal. The specific formula is shown in (7.11):
⎧
⎨ I (t − 1) + 5 0.5 < |h(t)| < 1.5
I (t) I (t) 1.5 < |h(t)| < 2.5 (7.11)
⎩
I (t − 1) − 5 3.5 < |h(t)| < 4.5
Then in order to verify the control effect of the special controller, two kinds of
trials have been designed on different workpieces. First, the welding experiments are
carried out on constant welding parameter; for other welding, trials are implemented
on different shape of workpieces which have added the controller to the control
system. The welding quality will be influenced by the shape of workpiece due to the
different shape of workpiece leads to uneven heat input, and increasing the heat will
affect the penetration of welding pool. Thus, this kind of trials could be used to test
the monitoring effect of controller.
Fig. 7.8 T-shape welded plate under constant welding current and the arc sound energy
It can be concluded from the T-shape workpiece shown in Fig. 7.8 that the welding
width is generally getting wider while decreasing the weld plate. During the whole
welding process, the weld joint generally changed from partial penetration to full
penetration, and then becomes excessive penetration due to the uneven heat dissipa-
tion. The heat input becomes the large in the end of welding, so the energy of arc
sound signal will have a sharp falling after the general increasing trend. It is obvious
that the welding quality is unstable under the constant welding parameters due to
the shape of the welding plate. Thus, it is necessary to achieve automatic adjust-
ment of welding parameter during the T-shape workpiece GTAW welding according
to the variation of welding penetration. The special piecewise controller based on
BPANN is used in T-shape, dumb-bell shape and gradient type workpiece in order to
test the control effect. The verification trials are implemented for the same welding
parameters on the collected acoustic signal during the welding process. Then after
the preprocessing and feature extraction of arc sound signal, the current is adjusted
according to the rules of controller.
Figure 7.9 shows the result of verification experiment and Fig. 7.10 showed
the energy variation trend of arc sound signal under the regulation of controller.
Figure 7.11 shows the rectification of peak current during the control experiment of
Fig. 7.9 Welded workpiece under BPANN-PW controller

Fig. 7.10 Energy of arc

sound signal with 150
BPANN-PW controller
Energy E/(J)
100
50
20 40 60 80 100
Sampling number
Fig. 7.11 The rectification 280

of peak current in welding
Peak current I/(A)
experiment with 260

BPANN-PW controller
240
220
200
20 40 60 80 100
Sampling number
T-shape workpiece. It can be concluded that the energy of arc sound was vibrated at
a certain range due to the adjustment of BPANN piecewise (BPANN-PW) controller
as shown in Fig. 7.10. According to the experiment of constant welding parameter,
the arc sound energy presents a rising trend causing the variation of heat input.
The peak current is rectified at each step and presents the falling trend because
in order to decrease the influence of heat input it is important to lower the peak
current. As the results showed, the peak current indeed decreased along with the
rectification of BPANN-PW controller, which means this controller is suitable for
our welding monitoring and control. In addition, it can be seen from the welding
plate shown in Fig. 7.9 that the weld joint is maintained a certain width and height,
and the welding penetration state is good and even for the welding process. Thus,
this special BPANN-PW controller could achieve online welding penetration control
for T-shape workpiece and the control effect could get good welding penetration and
welding quality [34] (Fig. 7.12).
Then in order to verify the control effect, the same verification experiments have
been implemented on the dumb-bell shape and gradient-type workpiece. First, the
experiments have been implemented under constant welding parameters. Owing to
the variation in heat conduction, the welding process could not get good penetration in
dumb-bell shape and gradient-type workpiece, and the results are shown in Figs. 7.13a
and 7.14a. Then the verification experiments are also implemented on these two
Fig. 7.12 The flow diagram of online control of penetration state via arc sound signal
Fig. 7.13 Dumb-bell workpiece welded under constant current and BPANN-PW controller. a Top-
side and backside of workpiece with constant welding current. b Topside and backside of workpiece
with BPANN-PW controller
Fig. 7.14 Energy of arc sound and rectify of peak current in welding experiment with BPANN-PW
controller of dumb-bell shape workpiece
kinds of workpiece with the BPANN-PW controller. The flow diagram of the online
control of penetration state via arc sound signal is shown in Fig. 7.12. The arc sound
signal will be processed after all the procedures above is followed and finally used
to achieve the online monitoring of penetration state. It can be directly observed
from Figs. 7.13b and 7.15b that the welding quality has been greatly improved by
the special controller and the welding current has been controlled at a certain range
which is also sensitive to the change of penetration state for different welding joint
(Fig. 7.16).
The result showed that the welding current always had an unstable area during
the starting arc period and then it was generally changed according the analysis
rule of piecewise controller. While the recognition value was full penetration, then
the welding current maintained the original current, and when the recognition value
was partial penetration the welding current should increase 5 A at every step of
controlling. On the contrary, the welding current should decrease 5 A every 5000
Fig. 7.15 Gradient-type welded workpiece under BPANN-PW controller. a Topside and backside
of workpiece with constant welding current. b Topside and backside of workpiece with BPANN-PW
controller
Fig. 7.16 Energy and rectify of peak current in welding experiment with BPANN-PW controller
of gradient type workpiece
collecting sample while the recognition value was excessive penetration. After the
adjustment, the process will continue from the beginning and the new arc sound
signal is collected.
In conclusion, the online monitoring system could achieve the collection of arc
sound signal and feature extraction. The self-design BPANN-PW controller could
control the penetration state of GTAW welding process via acoustic signal.
Chapter 8
Microphone Array Technology
in Welding Dynamic Process Monitoring
Many researches have been performed in acoustic sensor; however, arc sound of
welding itself is a complex feature. It is hard to identify the pure sound signal to
achieve utilizing control-based acoustic signal. Most of the studies were implemented
on single microphone which could not catch overall information during the welding
process. Thus, we decided to consider using more microphones to collect welding
sound signal.
8.1 Establishment of Microphone Array Acquisition

System
The schematic diagram of the monitoring system is shown in Fig. 8.1. It consists of six
parts: the robotic system, the vision sensor system, acoustic sensor system, welding
system, welding exhaust system and the computer [35]. The vision sensor and the
dual-microphone are connected directly to the computer and control by a computer
software. The vision system is composed of a CCD and optical system. The result
of vision sensor is considered as observation and compared with the analysis of
sound signal. The robotic system is ARC Mate 100iC, a six-degree industry robot
manufactured by FANUC with a Lincoln Electric Power Wave F355i and AutoDrive
4R90. The welding exhaust system is provided by Ozone Pollution Technology.
The acoustic system consisted of two ultimate microphones for professional USB
recording. The Yeti Pro microphone utilizes a high-quality 192 kHz/2-bit analog-
to-digital converter to send remarkable audio fidelity directly into computer. The
specification of microphone is shown in Table 8.1.
The experiment is carried out using the 4 mm GS 250 steel through pulsed MIG
welding. The parameters are shown in Table 8.2. In order to get the relevance between
arc sound signal and distance, a series of special experiments were designed and
implemented on the GS 250 steel. The height of weld gun is maintained at 4 mm
and the welding path is from starting point A to ending point B. The changing path

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_8
98 8 Microphone Array Technology in Welding Dynamic Process Monitoring
Welding system Welding system
Welding machine
Welding Robot Exhaust fan
Welding process control
PC Noise generation
Signal collection
Signal collection
Workpiece
Microphone Microphone
#1 Image collection #2
Visual sensor
Fig. 8.1 The schematic diagram of the experimental system
Table 8.1 The specification of microphone

Performance MP201
Power required/consumption 5 V 500 mA (USB)/48 V DC phantom power (analog)
Sample rate 22–192 kHz
Bit rate 24 bit
Capsules 3 Blue-proprietary 14 mm condenser capsules
Polar patterns Stereo, cardioid, bidirectional, omnidirectional
Frequency response 20–20 kHz
Sensitivity 4.5 mV/Pa (1 kHz)
Max SPL 120 dB (THD:0.5%1 kHz)
Impedance >16 ohms
Power output (RMS) 130 mW
THD 0.009%
Signal to noise 114 dB
Dimensions (extend in stand) 4.72 (12 cm) × 4.92 (12.5 cm) × 11.61 (29.5 cm)
Weight (microphone) 1.2 lbs (0.55 kg)
8.1 Establishment of Microphone Array Acquisition System 99
Table 8.2 Experiment

Parameter type Value Parameter type Value
conditions and parameters
Impulse frequency 2 Wire diameter φ 1
(Hz) (mm)
Feedback arc 23.3 TRIM 0.55
voltage (V)
Feedback arc 120.7 Ar air flow L 12
current (A) (l/min)
WFS (IPM) 280 Arc height (mm) 3–6 mm
Welding speed V 6 Material type GS 250
(mm/s)
Fig. 8.2 The schematic

diagram of the experimental
system
is shown in Fig. 8.2. The distance of migration is ±10 mm away from the welding
seam center. Two acoustic sensors collected the arc sound signal simultaneously and
sent the data to the computer. The program is running through VC++ and MATLAB.
8.2 Research of Blind Signal Separation in Welding

Dynamic Process
There were splash sound and background interference noise in welding site in addi-
tion to arc sound; that is to say, the actual welding environment is a complex envi-
ronment which distributes multiple sources in space. This means that the sound
signal collected by a single microphone is a mixed sound signal containing but being
not equivalent to our interested welding arc sound signal, so it is necessary to use
microphone array technology based on multi-channel mixed sound signal collected
by microphone array. Blind signal separation algorithm can be used to separate out
welding-related sound signals which we are interested in, thus helping to realize
quality monitoring of dynamic welding process.
8.2.1 FastICA Blind Signal Separation Algorithm
Blind signal separation is a classic problem in the field of signal processing—

meaning that original signals are separated from multiple observed signals with-
out the knowledge of the sound sources and the mixed model. So far, there are many
ways to solve such problems, but independent component analysis (ICA) method is
an important and well-developed way to solve this problem, and FastICA algorithm
is currently the most widely used method.
FastICA blind signal separation algorithm is a fixed-point algorithm based on
the criterion of negative entropy maximization, which was first proposed by Aapo
Hyvärinen in 1999 and belongs essentially to a neural network algorithm. The basic
idea of FastICA algorithm is projection tracking, using fixed-point iterative method to
obtain projection vectors, and ensuring projections that observed signals are projected
in the direction of projection vector with non-Gaussian maximum.
Figure 8.3 is the diagram of FastICA algorithm, and the approximate maximum of
negative entropy is taken as independent criterion of separated signals. At the same
time, a nonlinear link g is introduced in the algorithm, because simply maximizing
negative entropy results in divergence to infinity, and the introduction of nonlinear
link can overcome it. Meanwhile, g is monotonically reversible, so the statistical
independence of y is equivalent to the statistical independence of u.
The nonlinear function g has been determined according to the following principle,
assuming that p(ui ) and p(yi ) denote the probability density function of ui and yi ,
respectively. They satisfy the following relation:
Fig. 8.3 FastICA algorithm diagram

8.2 Research of Blind Signal Separation in Welding Dynamic Process 101
∂u i p(u i )
p(yi ) = p(u i ) = (8.1)
∂ yi gi (u i )
According to peak power constrained maximum entropy theorem, we can observe

that when yi obeys uniform distribution, the output entropy can be the largest. In order
to ensure yi satisfies uniform distribution in the range of [0, 1], that is, p(yi ) = 1, then
there must be:

p(u i ) = gi (u i ) (8.2)
Therefore, g needs to satisfy the constraint in (8.2), that is, the derivative of g
should be equal to the probability distribution of u. But it is not necessary to strictly
satisfy the above constraints. When g is close to the cumulative distribution function
of the original signal s, the algorithm can get a good separated result.
In practice, the following functions are used in the algorithm:
g1 (u) = tanh(a1 ∗ u) (8.3)
g2 (u) = u ∗ exp(−a2 ∗ u 2 /2) (8.4)
g3 (u) = u 3 (8.5)
where g1 is suitable for coexistence of sub-Gaussian and super-Gaussian distributions

in source signals, g2 is suitable for separating super-Gaussian mixed signals and g3
is suitable for separating sub-Gaussian mixed signals. Speech signals usually satisfy
super-Gaussian distributions, so this paper choice is nonlinear function g2 to realize
FastICA separation process.
In this paper, FastICA toolbox under MATLAB platform is used to implement
blind signal separation process. The algorithm flowchart is shown in Fig. 8.4.
8.2.2 FastICA Blind Signal Separation Results
In actual welding process, there was serious splash, and the specific performance was
that the bursting sound of droplets was obvious, and welding arc sound produced
by plasma resonance seemed to be much lower and deeper, that is to say, there
were two kinds of sound closely related with welding behaviors in actual welding
environment, as well as background noise. Therefore, we need to use FastICA blind
signal separation algorithm to distinguish these sound sources in order to facilitate
features analysis of sound signals subsequently.
Figure 8.5 shows the time and frequency domain analysis [fast Fourier transform
(FFT)] results of the first observed signal. It can be seen from the time-domain
waveform that the mixed signal contains welding arc sound and splash sound. In
Fig. 8.4 FastICA algorithm flowchart
Fig. 8.5 Time and frequency domain analysis of first observed signal
8.2 Research of Blind Signal Separation in Welding Dynamic Process 103
order to further compare these two different sounds, we extract a single arc sound
signal and splash sound signal to analyze, and the comparison results are shown in
Fig. 8.6. Figure 8.6a shows that the splash sound signal exhibits a sharp oscillation
character in time domain compared with arc sound signal. Figure 8.6b shows that the
high-frequency energy of splash sound is significantly enhanced, and the difference
in energy distribution in frequency domain further reflects the significant difference
in vocal mechanism between these two sounds.
From the above analysis, we can conclude that FastICA algorithm successfully
recovers splash sound from the mixed signals in pulsed MAG welding process,
(a) Time domain comparison
(b) Frequency domain comparison

Fig. 8.6 Comparison between arc sound signal and splash sound signal
but does not recover the welding arc sound, which may be caused by that frequency
domain. Energy distribution of arc sound is broad, and its non-Gaussian characteristic
is not significant enough. The frequency-domain energy distribution of splash sound
is concentrated due to its violent oscillation characteristic, so its non-Gaussian char-
acteristic is obvious, which is more likely to be recovered under the same algorithm
(Figs. 8.7 and 8.8).
8.3 Arc Sound Signal Analyzed by Dynamic Welding

Process
The arc sound generated in MIG welding process belongs to a kind of vibration signal.
The features of dual-microphones also have periodicity and statistics features just
like the vibration signals. The time-domain feature is widely used in signal process
because of its direct visual and easy to get [23].
8.3.1 Feature Extraction of Dual-Microphone
Considering the direct-current coupling pattern, the DC bias would disturb the
collection effect. Preprocessing needs to be implemented first before feature
extraction.
m
s(i)
s(i) = s(i) − n=0 (8.6)
m
Then, a rectangular window (n = 15,120) was added to the original signal in order
to decrease the influence of impulse oscillation. The feature could be a more accurate
expression for the changing welding path.
For arc sound signal in MIG welding process, the statistical characteristics are the
most favorite and widely used features in signal analysis. Six time-domain features
were chosen as the evaluation criterion for the arc sound signal. They are standard
deviation, mean sound, covariance, root-mean-square, log energy and arc energy, as
described in the following Eq. (8.7).

N −1 n
1 1
n
e= |xi |; En = xn (m); xrms =
2
xi2 ;
n i=1 m=0
n i=1

1 n
Sd = n−1 (xi − x)2 ; Le = log(E) (8.7)
i=1
8.3 Arc Sound Signal Analyzed by Dynamic Welding Process 105
Fig. 8.7 Time and frequency

domain analysis of observed
and separated signals
(a) Time domain waveforms of observed signals
(b) Frequency domain results of observed signals
(c) Time domain waveforms of separated signals
(d) Frequency domain results of separated signals

Fig. 8.8 Time and frequency domain analysis of splash sound signal
The processing results are shown in Fig. 8.9. The features could reflect the chang-
ing position of sound source which presents the vibration of welding path. While the
weld gun moves from starting point A to ending point B, microphones show differ-
ent changing pattern. The difference indicated that there was a strong relationship
between arc sound energy with distance.
8.3.2 Establish Linear Fitting Model of Dual-Microphone
The welding path was changing from −10 to 10 mm during the whole welding
process. When combining the arc sound feature with welding deviation ±10 mm, it
can be concluded that the arc sound energy had linear relationship with the welding
deviation. Then the linear fitting was implemented to dual-microphone separately.

S1 (i) = k1 a + b1
(8.8)
S2 (i) = k2 a + b2
The fitting results shown in Fig. 8.10 present that microphone 1 was progressively
increasing along with the welding path moving from −10 to 10 mm. The microphone
2 was decreasing progressively along with the welding deviation. The linear fitting
model of dual-microphone for monitoring the welding path is:

S1 (i) = 2.9827a(i) + 90.0119
(8.9)
S2 (i) = −2.49676a(i) + 98.7005
(a) (b)
0.12 200
Microphone 1
0.11 Microphone 2
150
Energy
0.1
STD
100
0.09
50 Microphone 1
0.08
Microphone 2
0
0 50 100 0 20 40 60 80 100
Sample Sample
(c) (d)
-3
x 10 10
2
5
1
Mean sound
Log energy
0
0
-5
-1
-10 Microphone 1
Microphone 1
Microphone 2 Microphone 2
-2 -15
0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100
Sample Sample
(e) (f)
-3
x 10 0.25
12
Microphone 1
0.2 Microphone 2
10
Covariance
0.15
RMS
8
0.1
6
0.05
Microphone 1
Microphone 2
4 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 0 50 100
Sample Sample
Fig. 8.9 The feature extraction of dual-microphone: a standard deviation, b arc sound energy,
c mean sound, d log energy, e covariance, f root-mean-square
In order to make the model more flexible and adaptable, five sets of experiments
were conducted under the same welding conditions. The statistical features were
extracted from the arc sound signal for both microphones. The arc sound energy was
chosen to be the one to implement the linear fitting. The linear fitting results are
obtained separately for each acoustic sensor, and the results are shown in Fig. 8.11.
Fig. 8.10 The linear fitting 160

Micro #1
of arc sound energy
s=-2.49676a+98.7005 Fit curve for Micro #1
140 Micro #2
Fit curve for Micro #2
Arc energy
120
100
80
60
s=2.9827a+90.0119
40
-10 -5 0 5 10
Deviation value a(mm)
According to these five linear fitting models, the new model for the monitoring
welding path based on dual-microphone could be calculated as follows:
⎧ ai1 + ai2 + ai3 + ai4 + ai5
⎪
⎨a =
n
(8.10)
⎪
⎩b = bi1 + bi2 + bi3 + bi4 + bi5
n
The final model for the dual-microphone is:

S1 (i) = 2.339109a2 (i) + 82.17477
(8.11)
S2 (i) = −2.483544a2 (i) + 93.89946
8.3.3 Establish Linear Fitting Model of Dual-Microphone
In order to prove the monitoring effect of this linear model, some verification tests
were implemented in this system. Under the same welding condition, the welding
path was from −10 to 10 mm and arc sound signal were collected and analyzed by
dual-microphone, as shown in Fig. 8.12. Two sets of arc sound feature presented
the different changing trend of dual-microphone. Then, the relationship between arc
sound energy with welding deviation could be deducted from 4 to 6. The prediction
path of welding could be calculated from:
⎧ S1 (i) − 82.17477
⎪
⎨ a2 (i) =
2.339109 (8.12)
⎪
⎩ a (i) = 93.89946 − S2 (i)
2
2.483544
(a) 200
200 Micro #1
Microphone 1 180 Fit curve for Micro #1
Microphone 2 Micro #2
160 s=-2.32659a+82.855 Fit curve for Micro #2
150
Arc energy
140
Energy
100 120
100
50 80
60
s=1.62381a+72.2538
0 40
0 20 40 60 80 100 -10 -5 0 5 10
Sample Deviation value a(mm)
(b)
200
200 Micro #1
Microphone 1 Fit curve for Micro #1
Microphone 2 s=-2.4272a+90.7955 Micro #2
150 150 Fit curve for Micro #2
Arc energy
Energy
100 100
50 50
s=1.882145a+74.07975
0 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 -10 -5 0 5 10
Sample
(c) Deviation value a(mm)
120 Micro #1
140 s=-1.523285a+89.67535
Fit curve for Micro #1
Micro #2
100 120 Fit curve for Micro #2
100
Arc energy
Energy
80
80
60
60
40 Microphone 1
40 s=2.77028a+80.5148
Microphone 2
20 20
0 20 40 60 80 100 -10 -5 0 5 10
(d)
140 160
Micro #1
140 Micro #2
120 Fit curve for Micro #2
Arc energy
120
Energy
100
100
80
80
60 Microphone 1 60
Microphone 2 s=2.9827a+90.0119
40 40
0 20 40 60 80 100 -10 -5 0 5 10
Sample
(e) Deviation value a(mm)
200 200 Micro #1
Microphone 1 Fit curve for Micro #1
Microphone 2 Micro #2
150 150
Arc energy
Energy
100 100
s=2.43661a+94.0136
50 50
0 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 -10 -5 0 5 10
Fig. 8.11 The linear fitting of arc sound energy and fitting results: a Test 1, b Test 2, c Test 3,
d Test 4, e Test 5
Fig. 8.12 The linear fitting 200

of arc sound energy Microphone 1
Microphone 2
150
Energy
100
50
0
0 20 40 60 80 100
Sample
The predicted results of two acoustic sensors are shown in Figs. 8.13 and 8.14.
The blue points in Fig. 8.13 were the predicted deviation which showed obviously
linear characteristic just like the welding path. The red points were the absolute
predicted error of microphone 1 which ranged from −15.3139 to 15.42 mm. Mean
error of microphone 1 was 6.5814 mm. For microphone 2, the absolute error ranged
Fig. 8.13 The predicted 30

results of microphone 1
20
10
Distance
-10
Predicted deviation
-20
Real deviation
-30 Error
-40
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Time
Fig. 8.14 The predicted 40

results of microphone 2
20
Distance
-20
Predicted deviation
Real deviation
-40 Error
-60
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Time
from −8.198 to 3.554 mm and the mean error was −2.5084 mm. The prediction
accuracy of microphone 2 was better than microphone 2. Because the microphone
1 was influenced by welding exhaust fan, two prediction models were separately
established without any internal relationship.
The predicted accuracy of dual-microphone was different and separated from
each other during the monitoring of welding path due to the modeling method. The
modeling method based on separated acoustic sensor was the same as the single
sensor in monitoring the welding process. Also, the predictive effect of these two
models was not good enough to monitor the welding path. So further improvement
need to be done to the arc sound signal.
8.3.4 Improvement of Prediction Model for Dual-Microphone
In order to highlight the advantages of dual-microphone, it is essential to combine the

data from two microphones. As the arc sound signals were simultaneously acquired
during the welding process, so the arc sound could be expressed by arc sound energy
of two microphones in 3D vision just like in Fig. 8.15. It can be concluded that
five sets of arc sound energy had the similar changing trend while presented with
arc sound based on two acoustic sensors. When 3D arc sound is projected onto
two-dimensional axis, one position in the line welding line corresponded to two
microphones and also each position had five values for one microphone under the
same welding environment, such as x 1 , x 2 , x 3 , x 4 and x 5 . In order to get relative
feature of the arc sound energy for the two acoustic sensors, the mean value of these
five points were calculated as:
x1 + x2 + x3 + x4 + x5
x(1,2) = (8.13)
5
Fig. 8.15 The 3D vision of

arc sound through
dual-microphone
200
150
Energy 2
100
150
100
50
10 50
5 0 Energy 1
-5 -10 0
Time
Fig. 8.16 Two-plane projection graph: a Microphone #1, b Microphone #2
The synthetic arc sound of above five sets of data is shown in Fig. 8.17. After
calculating separately for each sensor, the two-dimensional data was projected onto
3D axis with three parameters (Fig. 8.16).
It can be concluded from the 3D graph that the arc sound could be described as
space curve function based on two arc sound energies. The general equation of space
curve is:

y = β 0 + β 1 x1 + β 2 x2 (8.14)
The arc sound feature was fitting as the general space curve in order to get a
prediction model for monitoring the welding path. After fitting the arc sound signal
we get:
y = −11.2439 + 0.2819x1 − 0.1264x2 (8.15)
Fig. 8.17 Three-plane

projection graph
Fig. 8.18 The prediction result of 3D monitoring model
where β̂0 = −11.2439, β̂1 = 0.2819 and β̂2 = −0.1264, the confidence interval of
β̂0 , β̂1 , β̂2 were, respectively, [−13.4794 −9.0084], [0.2681 0.2957] and [−0.1395
−0.1132]. On comparing the results, the arc sound signal also implemented binary
linear regression. The fitting model was
y = −18.1589 + 0.6621x1 − 0.2375x2 − 0.0025x12 + 0.0004x22 (8.16)
For the binary linear model, β̂0 = −18.1589, β̂1 = 0.6621, β̂2 = −0.2375 and
β̂3 = 0.0004. Then, the verification tests were conducted to these models. The pre-
diction results are presented in Fig. 8.18. It was obvious that the predicted value was
close to the real value than the separated single linear model. For two 3D prediction
models, the mean absolute error of one variable linear model was 0.6708 mm, the
maximum error was 5.6703 mm and the minimum error was 0.3458 mm. For the
binary linear model, the mean absolute error was 1.1901 mm, the maximum error
was 3.652 mm and the minimum error was 1.9575 mm. These results showed that
the prediction effect of one variable linear model was better than binary model. The
one variable prediction model was suitable for our monitoring of welding path.
8.4 Welding Dynamic Process Monitoring via Microphone

Array
8.4.1 Time Delay Estimation Theory
According to the inverse square law of signal propagation, the signal receiving model
of the dual-microphone array can be expressed as:
xi (n) = s(n − τi )/di + n i (n) (8.17)
In this formula, s(n − τi ) represents acoustic signal, n i (n) is additive white noise,
i = 1, 2, di , τi represent the distance and time delay between sound source and
ith microphone, respectively. The cross-correlation function of two-channel signals
x1 (n) and x2 (n) can be expressed as:
R12 (τ ) = E(x1 (n)x2 (n − τ )) (8.18)
Substituting Eq. (8.17) into Eq. (8.18) we get:
R12 (τ ) = α1 α2 E(s(n − τ1 )s(n − τ2 − τ ))

+ α1 E(s(n − τ1 )n 2 (n − τ ))
+ α2 E(s(n − τ2 − τ )n 1 (n))
+ E(n 1 (n)n 2 (n − τ )) (8.19)
α1 and α2 are the attenuation factors determined by propagation distance. In most

cases, the noise signals are independent of each other, and formula 8.19 could be
simplified as:
R12 (τ ) = α1 α2 E(s(n − τ1 )s(n − τ2 − τ ))

= α1 α2 R SS (τ − (τ1 − τ2 )) (8.20)
R SS is the cross-correlation function of sound source signal. It can be concluded

from the properties of the autocorrelation function that while τ = (τ1 − τ2 ), R12 (τ )
has the maximum value. The value of the two-way observation signal when the
cross-correlation function obtains the maximum value is the time delay value.
In the actual environment, the existence of noise and reverberation will weaken
the maximum value of Eq. (8.20). When the noise and reverberation are relatively
serious, multiple peaks will appear which seriously affects the accuracy and precision
of time delay estimation. Generalized cross-correlation (GCC) is the solution to this
problem. It is to weight the signal in the power spectrum domain, highlight the signal
and suppress the noise, so as to sharpen the peak value of the correlation function at
the time delay, expressed as:
8.4 Welding Dynamic Process Monitoring via Microphone Array 115
∞
RGCC (τ ) = ψg (ω)φ12 (ω)eiωr dω (8.21)
−∞
Here, ψg (ω) is the weight function, φ12 (ω) is the power spectrum of R12 (τ ), and
ω is the angular frequency.
8.4.2 Inspection and Localization of Welding Defects
After the inspection of sound source, the next step is to analyze the welding defect.
The analysis experiments are designed in large current and low welding speed in
order to generate welding defect.
A. Feature Analysis of Welding Sound for Welding Defect
Three weld seams are selected to analyze the characteristic changes of sound sig-
nals during the welding process. First, in actual welding process, when burn-through
defects happened, the obvious changes could be heard, mainly in two aspects: (1)
welding arc tones significantly changed; and (2) splash sound intensity significantly
reduced. It was also noted that: (1) the changing times of welding arc tones corre-
sponded to the number of welding burn-through defects; (2) where the splash inten-
sity weakened did not correspond to burn-through defects. Therefore, the changes
of welding arc tones and splash intensity are chosen as the two focus.
B. Arc Tones Variation During Welding Process
There are three typical sound signal states in actual welding process, namely, the
first state—not burn-through with strong splash, the second state—not burn-through
with no or light splash, and the third state—burn-through. In order to find out the
specific changes of arc tones during the welding process, it is necessary to analyze
and compare these three typical sound signal states. Take the first observed signal
of the first weld seam as an example. We take 8000 sampling points of three typical
states to analyze. The time-domain waveforms of three typical states are shown in
Fig. 8.19. The sound pressure amplitude of splash signal is significantly higher than
that of arc sound signal, and the variation in time-domain waveform of burn-through
state is obviously different from that of the other states. Since the variation in signal
waveform is mainly represented by frequency domain energy distribution, we need
to further analyze three typical signals in frequency domain.
The FFT results of three typical signals are shown in Fig. 8.20. It can be seen
that the low-frequency band energy distribution of burn-through sound signal is
significantly different from that of the other two states, which is consistent with the
previous conclusion, that is, the arc tones suddenly become more dull; the energy
of the band above 2000 Hz is relatively weak, especially compared with the first
typical signal state (the energy distribution of splash signal is mainly concentrated in
high frequency), which is also consistent with the previous analysis, namely, when
Fig. 8.19 Three typical states of welding sound signals
Fig. 8.20 FFT results of three typical signals
burn-through defect occurred, the splash intensity significantly reduced. The low-
frequency band energy distribution of three typical signals is shown in Fig. 8.21. It
can be observed that 500–1000 Hz band energy of burn-through state is significantly
higher than that of the other two states. The time-domain waveform of three burn-
through state signals and the energy distribution of 0–4000 Hz band are shown in
Fig. 8.22. The signal characteristics of three burn-through defects are consistent, and
the energy of 500–1000 Hz band is significantly enhanced.
In order to further verify that the selected 500–1000 Hz band energy can identify
welding burn-through defects, this paper analyzes the short-term energy of the first
observed signal of three weld seams through windowing, using Hamming window
Fig. 8.21 Low-frequency energy distribution of three typical signals
Fig. 8.22 The time and frequency domain waveform of three welding sound signals in burn through
of 3000 sampling points. The results of 500–1000 Hz band short-term energy anal-
ysis are shown in Fig. 8.16. It can be clearly found that when burn-through defects
occurred, the energy of 500–1000 Hz band suddenly increased. Further analysis indi-
cates that the abrupt changing point of 500–1000 Hz band energy corresponds to the
end position of burn-through defect. This phenomenon can be explained by the fact
that at the end of burn-through defect, a closed cavity is formed in weld seam, and
there is a resonance effect of arc in this cavity, resulting in significant changes in arc
tone (Fig. 8.23).
C. Arc Tones Variation During the Welding Process
According to the conclusion of section III, we know that FastICA blind signal sep-
aration algorithm can successfully separate out the splash sound signal. So we can
Fig. 8.23 Short intensity variation during the welding process
analyze the relation between the change of splash intensity and welding burn-through
defects based on the results of blind signal separation. The intensity changes of the
splash signal (separated signal ic1) are analyzed from four aspects, such as short-term
energy, standard deviation, kurtosis and skewness.
Short-term energy directly reflects splash intensity, and it is calculated as follows:
N −1

En = xn2 (m) (8.22)
m=0
where xn (m) is the sound pressure value at the mth sampling point of the nth frame
and N is the window length (3000 in the text). The standard deviation, as an indicator
of the dispersion degree of data distribution, can be used to measure the fluctuation
level of welding sound signal, which is calculated as follows:
N −1
1
σn = [xn (m) − μn ]2 (8.23)
N − 1 M=0
where μn is the mean of the nth frame signal. Kurtosis can be used to describe the
steepness of data distribution compared with normal distribution: more than 3 is
relatively steep, and less than 3 is relatively flat. The bigger the absolute value of the
peak, the greater the difference between the data distribution and normal distribution.
Kurtosis can be calculated by the following formula:
N −1
1
Kurtosis = [xn (m) − μn ]4 /σn4 (8.24)
N − 1 m=0
Skewness can be used to measure the symmetry of the data distribution compared
with normal distribution; bigger than 0 indicates that at the right side of data distri-
bution there are many extreme values; less than 0 means that at the left side there
are many extreme values. The bigger the absolute skewness value is, the greater the
skewness of the data distribution is compared to normal distribution. Skewness can
be calculated by the following formula:
N −1
1
Skewness = [xn (m) − μn ]3 /σn3 (8.25)
N − 1 m=0
In this paper, a short-time analysis function has been proposed to realize short-
time energy analysis, including short-time energy, standard deviation, kurtosis and
skewness of splash signal.
The results of analysis are shown in Fig. 8.24. In contrast with three burn-through
defects in first weld seam, it is found that the short-time energy, standard deviation and
kurtosis distribution change obviously in the corresponding positions, but the change
of skewness is less obvious. Here, we choose short-term energy as an important
characteristic, which is more directly correlated with splash intensity.
Fig. 8.24 Short-term analysis result of splash signal

8.4.3 Welding Defects Localization and Recognition
According to the analyses above, the process of inspection of welding defect can be
concluded as shown in Fig. 8.25.
The welding defect will be judged in two ways after preprocessing and feature
extraction. When the mutation happened, there are two different processed algo-
rithms accomplished. First, the recognition of welding defect has been conducted by
BP_AdaBoost. The features are set to be the input of the classification model. The
structure of BP_AdaBoost has been introduced in another paper [14–16]. Secondly,
Fig. 8.25 Process of inspection of welding defects

Fig. 8.26 The results of welding defect localization
according to the time delay and energy ratio, calculate the formula and get the pre-
diction result from least squares robust regression equation just as the localization
of sound source.
In order to verify the prediction results, the experiments have been conducted
under big current and low welding speed to generate failure welding. The prediction
results are shown in Fig. 8.26. The results showed that the position of welding
defect could be inspected correctly. The prediction number of welding defects also
corresponds to the actual welding process. However, the prediction of welding defect
is more accurate at the end of the generation than at the beginning. The next step
is trying to optimize the recognition algorithm in order to judge the beginning of
the defect generation, at least about the size of defect. This new way still gets a
good effective result in welding defect analysis and localization. Combined with the
classification model of welding defect, this method could provide the judgment about
the type of defect and location of the welding defect.
Chapter 9
Multi-source Information Fusion
Between Welding Arc Sound and Other
Welding Dynamic Processes
As welding is a highly nonlinear and time-varying complicated thermal process

accompanied by strong current and intense emission of sound, arc light and heat, the
single sensor applied in the above reports can only obtain part information reflecting
the penetration state instead of the comprehensive information. Not to mention that
the sensors are likely to be influenced by various factors such as arc disturbance,
spatter and noise. Therefore, many researchers attempted to utilize multisensory to
implement welding process monitoring. Chen et al. [52] used multi-sensor infor-
mation fusion technology in pulsed GTAW to obtain different information about
the welding process. As for the application of multi-sensor for welding penetration
monitoring, some researchers had done a series of studies about multi-sensory data
fusion of optical and acoustic sensors. Zhang and Chen [54] implemented seam
penetration identification using improved support vector machine based on fusion
of sound, voltage and spectrum signals. Wu et al. [55] extracted acoustic features
and visual features as the input of deep belief network (DBN) used for identifying
the VPPAW penetration state. Traditional optical and acoustic signal process and
feature extraction methods applied in the above reports need precise calculation and
large amounts of memory of computers, such as average filtering, Fourier transform,
wavelet decomposition and so on, which are impossible for human beings.
A novel methodology for real-time penetration monitoring of aluminium alloy
in pulsed GTAW was proposed using pattern-based visual and acoustic feature
extraction and ensemble learning method (Fig. 9.1).
The proposed methodology can predict penetration well through imitating
welder’s information-perceiving and decision-making process to visual-acoustic sig-
nal during pulsed GTAW process, which can be regarded as a promising technique
for intelligent welding. In future, not only welding penetration, welding defect are
worth to be investigated. Pattern-based feature extraction method and machine learn-
ing method might be an effective tool for real-time weld defect monitoring, which

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_9
124 9 Multi-source Information Fusion Between Welding Arc …
Fig. 9.1 The result of acquired visual and acoustic information
will enhance welding quality effectively during automatic welding process. Intelli-
gent welding technology is a hot topic and worth to be paid more attention. There
are lots of works that have studied in this area and more works are willing to be done
about intelligent welding.
Chapter 10
Summary and Conclusions
The arc sound signal had been studied for many years. The research scope is rang-
ing from mechanism to control system. The SJTU have been doing a lot of works
about the online welding quality monitoring. Many fundamental research have been
implemented about the characteristics of welding sound, the processing of welding
sound signals and the pattern recognition of the welding sound signal and welding
penetration. All of these studies provide the technical basis for achieving the welding
automation using acoustic signal. The automatic welding can only be achieved in
laboratory. For industrial application, the arc sound signal still cannot offer stable
control accuracy for the monitoring system. The online GTAW welding monitoring
still has some problems to solve. Therefore, to achieve the monitoring of GTAW
welding quality using arc sound signal will be the research topic in the future.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2002-0_10
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Acoustic Monitoring

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Acoustic Monitoring

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Na Lv · Shanben Chen

ISBN 978-981-15-2001-3 ISBN 978-981-15-2002-0 (eBook)

1 Multi-source Information of Arc Welding Dynamic Process . . . . . . 1

4 Channel Generation Mechanism and Modeling

8 Microphone Array Technology in Welding Dynamic Process

Nowadays, the research on intelligent and automatic welding process information

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 1

1.2 Acoustic Signal of Welding Dynamic Process

Fig. 1.1 Welder psycho-acoustic experiment

1.3 Classification of Welding Acoustic Signal

on real-time monitoring of welding penetration status based on sound signal has

1.4 Feature and Application Value of Arc Sound Signal

1.5 Influencing Factor of Arc Sound Signal

1.6 Microphone Array Measurement of Arc Sound

Fig. 1.3 Schematic diagram of microphone array position

2.1 Basic Arc Sound Source Model

In order to achieve the detection of welding defects, it is necessary to analyze the

2.1.1 Weld Pool Oscillation Model of Arc Sound

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 9

Fig. 2.1 The sound source model mechanism

Fig. 2.2 Quadrupole sound source model of welding arc sound

1 ∂ 2 u(x,y,t) ∂ 2 u(x,y,t) ∂ 2 u(x,y,t)

Variables separation u(r, θ, t) = z(r, θ )e−iωt ,

Fig. 2.3 Pool oscillation

2.1.2 Analysis and Validation of Sound Source for GTAW

Fig. 2.5 The arc sound

Sound s/(v) Sound s/(v) Sound s/(v)

2.1.3 Influence of Welding Parameters on Arc Sound Signal

In the formula, S is sound pressure, V represents the voltage of arc, I represents

3.1 Welding Operation System Setup

Arc sensor Control circuit

Fig. 3.1 GTAW welding system and sensing system

Fig. 3.4 The image of

Backside weld seam

Table 3.1 Major parameters

is filtered by MC104 signal conditioner which is steep dropping characteristics. The

(a) Microphone (b) Signal conditioner

Fig. 3.5 Weld sound arc sensor

Fig. 3.7 The original audible sound of welding process

3.2 Arc Sound Signal Preprocessing Method

Fig. 3.8 The original audible sound of different penetration state

3.2.1 Removal of DC Component

s(i) = s(i) − mean(s) (3.3)

3.2.2 Noise-Removal Process

Fig. 3.9 The process of wavelet packet denoising

Fig. 3.10 The analysis of noise signal

3.2.3 Region of Interest (ROI) Selected

3.2.4 Window Function Addition

Fig. 3.11 The extraction of region of interest

Fig. 3.12 The 1.5

Oversize or undersize of window length will impact the analyzed efficiency.

3.2.5 Analysis of Arc Sound Signal in Short Time Domain

3.2.6 Frequency-Domain Analysis of Arc Sound Signal

0.09 200 Partial penetration

Full penetration Full penetration

Partial penetration 600 Excessive penetration

3.2.7 Time–Frequency Analysis of Arc Sound Signal

Fig. 3.16 The feature distribution of time–frequency domain

3.2.8 Relationship Between Sound Feature and Penetration

Sound pressure s/(v)

Fig. 3.21 The

Fig. 3.22 The

4.1 Generation Mechanism of Arc Sound Channel