Composite Structures 55 (2002) 239246

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Prediction of the fatigue life of unidirectional glass ber/epoxy composite laminae using dierent neural network paradigms
Hany El Kadi *, Yousef Al-Assaf
School of Engineering, American University of Sharjah, P.O. Box 26666, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Abstract Predicting the fatigue life of ber-reinforced composite materials has been investigated from a number of viewpoints. Proposed methodologies have either been based on damage modeling or on some kind of mathematical relationship. Articial neural networks (ANN) were used as an alternative non-linear modeling technique due to their ability to learn by example. Previous research has shown that, if trained adequately, the ANN can be used to predict composites fatigue life for a given set of conditions usually sought by designers. Similar to other reported attempts, the authors' previous work used the classical feedforward ANN for the fatigue life prediction of composites. Although the use of this network model gave results comparable to current fatigue life prediction methods, other types of ANN such as modular, self-organizing, radial basis, and principal component analysis networks are considered for improving the prediction accuracy. A comparison of such ANN structures in predicting the fatigue behavior of unidirectional glass ber/epoxy composite laminae for various ber orientation angles and stress ratios is investigated in this work. 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Articial neural networks; Composite materials; Fatigue

1. Introduction The problem of fatigue failure prediction for berreinforced composites is of importance in the design and inspection of composite structures/components used in the various engineering applications. In the absence of a well-dened failure criterion that can be used to predict fatigue failure, extensive tests must be carried out for dierent ber orientation angles and loading conditions. The issue of fatigue life prediction of ber-reinforced composite materials has been investigated from a number of viewpoints. Proposed methodologies have either been based on damage modeling [16] or on some kind of mathematical relationship. Articial neural networks (ANN) are one of the articial intelligence concepts that have proved to be useful for various engineering applications [710]. Due to their massively parallel structure, ANN can deal with many multivariable non-linear modelings for which an accurate analytical solution is very dicult to obtain [7,8]. The ability to learn by example is one of the key aspects of ANN. The system is considered as a black
*

Corresponding author. Tel.: +971-6-5055466; fax: +971-6-5055979. E-mail address: hkadi@aus.ac.ae (H. El Kadi).

box and it is unnecessary to know the details of the internal behavior. These nets therefore may oer an accurate and cost-eective approach for modeling fatigue life. If trained adequately, the ANN can simply be used to obtain the life prediction of a given set of ber orientation/loading conditions which is usually sought by designers. The use of ANN in predicting a wide range of composite material properties has been investigated by several researchers [1114]. These researchers have used ANN to predict, among others, thermal conductivity, electrical conductivity, dielectric constants, componentproperty relationship, as well as biaxial strength properties in various types of composites. Only recently have ANN been used to predict fatigue failure [1517]. Artymiak et al. [15] used ANN to estimate the nite-life fatigue strength and fatigue limit of steel. Their predictions using ANN were found to be superior to those obtained with conventional methods for calculating the fatigue strength. Venkatesh and Rack [16] trained a backpropagation neural network to predict the elevated temperature creep-fatigue behavior of Ni-based alloy INCONEL 690. They concluded that the prediction accuracy using a few iterations and a simple network architecture showed signicant improvement

0263-8223/02/$ - see front matter 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 2 6 3 - 8 2 2 3 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 1 5 2 - 0

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when compared to ConManson, linear life fraction and hysteresis energy prediction techniques. Pleune and Chopra [17] also trained a backpropagation network to predict the fatigue life of carbon- and low-alloy steels for specied sets of loading and environmental conditions. They showed that ANN have great potential for predicting environmentally assisted corrosion due to the fact that the predictions are purely based on data and not on pre-conceptions. Another advantage was that the ANN could interpolate eects by learning trends and patterns when complete data sets are not available. Although some work was done using ANN in the study of fatigue, less work was done when the fatigue was related to composite materials. The use of ANN to predict the fatigue strength of APC-2 graphite-PEEK composites was addressed in the work by Aymerich and Serra [18]. The data used were obtained for a stress ratio of 0.1. The input parameters to the ANN were the number of cycles to failure and the stacking sequence of the laminate while obtaining the fatigue strength as an output. They concluded that ANN is a very attractive tool to model a set of fatigue data but should be used carefully to avoid poor predictions. Carbon-ber and glass-ber reinforced composites have been used by Lee et al. [19] to evaluate the performance of ANN in predicting fatigue failure of laminates under various stress ratios. They used the maximum and minimum values of the stress as well as the failure probability level as input parameters to the ANN while obtaining the number of cycles to failure as an output. The use of ANN to predict the fatigue failure of glass ber/epoxy laminae with a range of ber orientation angles under various loading conditions was considered by Al-Assaf and El Kadi [20]. The feedforward network used provided an accurate relationship between the input parameters (maximum stress, stress ratio, ber orientation angle) and the number of cycles to failure. The results obtained were found to be comparable to other current fatigue life prediction methods. However, to improve the fatigue life prediction accuracy, other types of ANN structures could be used [20]. Such structures would allow the network to apply techniques such as task decomposition and input clustering to deal with conicting patterns as well as limited number of available experimental data. Radial basis function (RBF), modular (MN), self-organizing (SOFM) and principal component analysis (PCA) neural networks are considered in this work to achieve the above-mentioned objective. 2. ANN paradigms In general, ANN consist of a layer of input neurons, a layer of output neurons and one or more layers of hid-

den neurons [7]. Neurons in each layer are fully or partially interconnected to preceding and subsequent layer neurons with each interconnection having an associated connection strength (or weight). A training algorithm is commonly used to iteratively minimize the following cost function with respect to the interconnection weights and neuron thresholds: E
P X N 1X 2 di zi ; 2 1 i1

where P is the number of training patterns and N is the number of output nodes. di and zi are the desired and actual responses for output node i, respectively. The training process is terminated either when the mean-square-error (MSE) between the observed data and the ANN outcomes for all elements in the training set has reached a pre-specied threshold or after the completion of a pre-specied number of learning epochs. Although all neural network models share common operational features such as the distribution of knowledge within the network and the massively parallel operation of the system, their underlying structures, input requirements and modeling and generalization abilities are dierent. Consequently, each paradigm would have advantages and disadvantages depending on the particular application. Hence, selecting the appropriate network class with suitable parameters is vital to ensure a successful application. The following neural network classes will be considered in predicting the composite fatigue life: Feedforward neural networks (FNN). This is the most known and commonly used class of networks. Although the main success of neural networks has been in the application of the multilayer FNN with backpropagation training, they suer from some drawbacks such as local convergence and the need for large training cases in order to make adequate modeling generalization [7,21]. Modular networks (MN). The central idea behind such networks is task decomposition, where in this case the concept of using a combined (or averaged) estimator may be able to exceed the limitation of a single estimator [7,21,22]. Using a modular network, the task of predicting the composite material fatigue life is split up among several local neural networks (sub-networks) without communicating with each other. The generalization requirement for each sub-network is reduced in comparison with a single NN that must learn the entire task. The task decomposition can provide generalization abilities to evaluate states never presented in training before. Combination weights that determine the degree by which each sub-network should contribute to the nal composite material life are estimated with an integrating unit. Furthermore, this integrating

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unit decides which module should learn which training pattern. Radial basis function networks (RBF). These networks are non-linear hybrid networks usually containing a single hidden layer. The activation function of the hidden layer neurons is a Gaussian transfer function. The centers and widths of such functions are obtained by unsupervised learning while supervised learning is used to update the connection weights between the hidden and output layers. It is claimed that these networks learn faster than FNN and need lesser number of training data, however their generalization capabilities are limited in comparison to those of the FNN [7,21]. Principal component analysis networks (PCAN). In this type of neural network the PCA is used to reduce the dimensionality of the input data or identify new meaningful underlying variables. The PCA involves a mathematical procedure that transforms a number of (possibly) correlated variables into a (smaller) number of uncorrelated variables called principal components. The rst principal component accounts for as much of the variability in the data as possible, and each succeeding component accounts for as much of the remaining variability as possible. After obtaining the PCA components, the supervised segment of the network performs the non-linear modeling of the fatigue life predictions using the classical FNN. 3. Experimental procedure and application design Specimens were fabricated using the `Scotchply Reinforced Plastic type 1003' prepreg at ve dierent ber orientation angles (h 0, 19, 45, 71 and 90), where h is the angle between the ber direction and the direction of the applied load. Aluminum tabs were then glued to the ends of the specimens for gripping purposes [6]. The tests were performed using an MTS testing machine controlled by an IBM personal computer. Regular tapered wedge grips (usually utilized for static tension tests) were modied to carry both tensile and compressive loadings [23]. Unidirectional ber-reinforced composite specimens were cyclically tested under load control condition at room temperature. Specimens built with the various ber angle orientations were tested under stress ratios R rmin =rmax of 0.5, 0 and 1 with a loading frequency of 3.3 Hz. As discussed in [20], the fatigue life of ber-reinforced composites is primarily a function of the ber orientation angle (h), stress ratio R and the maximum stress applied rmax ). These three parameters make up the input vector for the neural network while the single output of the network is the number of cycles to failure, Nf . In order to obtain acceptable and balanced neural network performance, normalization of the input and output data was conducted [20].

Ninety two experiments made up the application data. The Neurosolution-4 software was used to construct, train and test the networks [24]. 4. Results and discussion In this work, fatigue life predictions using the various networks are compared to the results obtained using the FNN method. Predictions obtained by each network greatly depend on the internal structure and the various parameters of the network. This explains the variation between the results published in [25] and those shown here. Table 1 shows the best results obtained for each network structure. In a MN, the number of sub-networks was seen to be of great eect on the prediction accuracy. Fig. 1 shows the normalized mean-square-error (NMSE) and the correlation coecient r for the dierent number of sub-networks. As long as the number of sub-networks is less than 7, the decomposition of task gives results that are superior to those obtained using a single network as is the case for FNN. However, if the number of local networks is made equal to 5 (modulating the data according to h), the best performance is obtained with a 5.7% NMSE. The software activation function of the integrating unit is e u i gi Pk ; uj j 1 e
Table 1 Comparison of NMSE and r for the various neural network structures NMSE FNN MN RBF SOFM PCAN 0.14273 0.05668 0.6600 0.0743 0.1402 r 0.9260 0.9726 0.4703 0.9624 0.9280

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Fig. 1. Eect of the number of sub-networks on the performance of modular neural networks.

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2

where ui being the weighted sum of inputs owing to the ith output neuron of the integrating unit. Therefore, if a minor activation ui is produced by the ith sub-network, it does not have a great impact on the overall output. This will be achieved by having an appropriate number of sub-networks (ve in this case) such that, at each value of h, the other four networks will not contribute signicantly to the output. It should be mentioned here that using six sub-networks renders one of them redundant and good results are still obtained. On the other hand, using three sub-networks still gives better results compared to FNN. However it should be emphasized that since the eect of h on the fatigue life is more pronounced than the eect of R, using ve subnetworks resulted in the best output. If predictions are required for other values of h, the activation is produced by more than one sub-network giving the appropriate result. The comparison between the fatigue life prediction using FNN and MN is shown in Figs. 24. The experimental data are also shown in the graphs. The results shown are for ber orientation angles of 0, 45 and 90 representing the whole range of orientation angles tested experimentally. The advantage of dividing the modeling task into sub-tasks is clearly shown in these gures. For all values of R, the modular network was generally capable of giving closer fatigue life prediction to experimental values compared to FNN. Although improvements were not specic to certain values of R or h, noticeable improvement can be seen especially for R 0:5 and 1 for all values of h. This is an indication that the task decomposition made it easier for each subnetwork to learn in its input space vicinity. Collectively, these improvements represent better generalization capabilities of the modular network. The task decomposition is much harder when a variety of inputs do not lead to distinct experimental outputs. This can be seen by comparing the predicted and experimental values for h 45 and 90 with R 0.

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Experimental (R=-1) 1.6 FNN (R=-1) Modular (R=-1) Experimental (R=0) FNN (R=0) 1.4 Modular (R=0) Experimental (R=0.5) FNN (R=0.5) Modular (R=0.5) 1.2 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Fig. 3. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and MN for h 45.

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Fig. 4. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and MN for h 90.

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Fig. 2. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and MN for h 0.

Although, for several other engineering applications, it has been shown that RBF learns better with small number of data points [21], this trend was not observed in this application. Furthermore, the number of cluster centers in the hidden layer of the RBF was reported to have a signicant eect on the prediction performance. In the current application, various settings for this number were tested to accommodate the clustering of the data as a function of h, R and rmax (Fig. 5). One would expect that increasing the number of clusters would enhance the learning. However having a number of clusters close to the number of training data requires that no overlap between the Gaussian functions centered at these points. Consequently, this requires that the unsupervised training should give a Gaussian width of zero, which will not occur. The best performance was achieved with 50 centers, however the results obtained were the worst compared to all other ANN structures. Figs. 68 show the comparison between the fatigue life predictions using FNN and those obtained using the RBF network. Comparing the predictions obtained by the RBF at h 0 with those obtained at h 45 and 90, it can be deduced that the prediction of the

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1.6 1.5 1.4 1.3 1.2 1.1 Experimental (R=-1) FNN (R=-1) RBF (R=-1) Experimental (R=0) FNN (R=0) RBF (R=0) Experimental (R=0.5) FNN (R=0.5) RBF (R=0.5) 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Fig. 5. Eect of the number of clusters on the performance of RBF neural network.

Fig. 8. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and RBF networks for h 90.

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Fig. 6. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and RBF networks for h 0.

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results. This conrms that the RBF network is capable of obtaining good local prediction results at the expense of having poor global modeling. Compared to the RBF, the FNN method not only resulted in better predictions at h 0 but also resulted in a better generalization. In PCAN, the eigenvalues corresponding to the percentage of the total variance in the observations explained by each eigenvector were 45%, 35% and 20%, respectively. This shows that the three principal components are critical for obtaining adequate fatigue life prediction. Conducting Bartlett's test for dimensionality of the input vector with a 95% signicant probability conrmed the need for all three PCA components. This could be explained by the fact that the experimental data scatter within a cluster is large such that clusters are not individually visible. Hence dimensionality reduction in the input space will have a negative eect on the network performance. The NMSE obtained using one or two PCAs was as high as 0.88. Using the PCAN produced values comparable to those obtained from the FNN (Table 1). Thus the transformation of the input parameters space into the PCA components had no eect on the prediction. The comparison between the fatigue life prediction using
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Fig. 7. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and RBF networks for h 45.

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experimental data at the former is far better than the latter. This trend can noticeably be seen in Figs. 7 and 8 where the RBF method gave a linear relationship with a much steeper slope compared to the experimental results. Consequently, varying the maximum applied stress, the RBF produced almost a single value for fatigue life clearly contradicting the experimental

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Fig. 9. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and PCA networks for h 0.

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Fig. 10. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and PCA networks for h 45.

Map Size

Fig. 12. Eect of the map size on the performance of self-organizing neural networks.

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Fig. 11. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and PCA networks for h 90.

FNN and PCAN is shown in Figs. 911. Although predictions for various conditions of input variables are dierent, the overall performance and generalization capabilities are similar. Another form of neural netwrok based on performing input dimensionality reduction is the self-organizing feature maps network (SOFM). The neurons of such networks are organized on a map and evolve according to the data presented to the network. The network partitions the input data to groups (clusters) and is used to extract useful information from it. Networks of this type impose a neighboring preserving on the input units, so that a certain topological property in the input data is reected on the output weights. In such networks the dimensionality of the input space is reduced to a one- or two-dimensional lattice of neurons. Since the SOFM tries to establish neighboring topologies of the input space, the size of the map would reect the clustering of the input data. The feature map computed by the SOFM is topologically ordered in the sense that the special location of a neuron in the lattice corresponds to a particular domain of input patterns. Fig. 12 shows the variation of the NMSE and r with the

map size. For small map sizes (less than 8 8), each cluster included input patterns having substantially different fatigue lives. Consequently, the supervised part of the network, operating on the output from the map, failed to adequately model the dierences in fatigue lives within this cluster. A map of 10 10 with a total number of neurons almost equal to the number of input data points resulted in a better performance compared to FNN. This indicates that to obtain superior performance, each data point had to be considered as a separate individual cluster. For the current set of experimental data, this reects the fact that, even similar input parameters, may result in substantially dierent values of fatigue lives. To thoroughly test the advantages of SOFM, a large number of data points are required. However in the present case, even with a limited number of data points, this method resulted in better fatigue life predictions than FNN. The comparison between the fatigue life prediction using FNN and SOFM networks is shown in Figs. 1315. For the various input combinations, the predictions obtained using the SOFM were superior to those obtained using FNN.

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2.9 2.85 2.8 2.75 2.7 2.65 2.6 2.55 2.5 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Experimental (R=-1) FNN (R=-1) SelfOrganizing (R=-1) Experimental (R=0) FNN (R=0) SelfOrganizing (R=0) Experimental (R=0.5) FNN (R=0.5) SelfOrganizing (R=0.5)

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Fig. 13. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and SOFM networks for h 0.

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Fig. 14. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and SOFM networks for h 45.

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Fig. 15. Comparison between fatigue life prediction using FNN and SOFM networks for h 90.

5. Conclusion This work showed that, compared to the classical FNN, other types of ANN could be used to improve the fatigue life prediction of composite materials. MN gave a signicant improvement in fatigue life prediction due to their ability to decompose the modeling task. Not only was the local modeling performance of the RBF network poor, but also its generalization capabilities were also unacceptable. No signicant dimensionality reduction was achieved by the PCAN and consequently its performance was similar to that of FNN. Clustering the input data with neighboring preserving (as is the case in SOFM) has the potential of giving accurate fatigue life prediction especially if a large number of data points are available. References
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[3] Tennyson RC. Strength and fatigue life design procedures for composite structures. In: Proceedings of 8th Symposium of Engineering Applications of Mechanics. Ottawa: National Research Council of Canada (NRCC); 1986. p. 329. [4] Tennyson RC, Wharram GE, Mabson GE. Final report on investigation of static failure and compressive fatigue of CF-18 graphite/epoxy laminates: part 1: experimental evaluation. Defence Research Establishment Pacic, Research and Development Branch, Department of National Defense, Victoria, BC, 1986. [5] Ellyin F, El Kadi H. A fatigue failure criterion for ber reinforced composite laminae. Compos Struct 1990;15:6174. [6] El Kadi H, Ellyin F. Eect of stress ratio on the fatigue of unidirectional glass ber/epoxy composite laminae. Composites 1994;25:91724. [7] Skapura D. Building neural networks. New York: ACM/AddisonWesley; 1996. [8] Herzallah R, Al-Assaf Y. Control of non-linear and time-variant dynamic systems using neural networks. In: Proceedings of the 4th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Florida, 2000. [9] Mansoor W, Al-Nashash H, Al-Assaf Y. Image classication using wavelets and neural networks. In: The 18th IASTED International Conference on Applied Informatics, Innsbruck, Austria, 2000. [10] Al-Nashash H, Al-Assaf Y, Lvov B, Mansoor W. Laser speckle for materials classication utilizing wavelets and neural networks image processing techniques. Materials Evaluation Journal 2001;59:10728. [11] Gotlib VA, Sato T, Beltzer AI. Neural computing of eective properties of random composite material. Comput Struct 2001;79:16. [12] Kasperkiewicz J. The application of ANNs in certain materialsanalysis problems. J Mater Process Technol 2000;106:749. [13] Konderla P, Mokanek T. Comparison of two methods for the analysis of composite materials. J Mater Process Technol 2000;106:8793. [14] Lee CS, Hwang W, Park HC, Han KS. Failure of carbon/epoxy composite tubes under combined axial and torsional loading 1. Experimental results and prediction of biaxial strength by the use of neural networks. Compos Sci Technol 1999;59:177988. [15] Artymiak P, Bukowski L, Feliks J, Narberhaus S, Zenner H. Determination of SN curves with the application of articial neural networks. Fatigue Fract Eng Mater Struct 1999;22: 7238. [16] Venkatesh V, Rack HJ. A neural network approach to elevated temperature creep-fatigue life prediction. Int J Fatigue 1999;21:22534. [17] Pleune TT, Chopra OK. Using articial neural networks to predict the fatigue life of carbon and low-alloy steels. Nucl Eng Des 2000;197:112. [18] Aymerich F, Serra M. Prediction of fatigue strength of composite laminates by means of neural networks. Key Eng Mater 1998;144:23140. [19] Lee JA, Almond DP, Harris B. The use of neural networks for the prediction of fatigue lives of composite materials. Compos Part A: Appl Sci Manufacturing 1999;30:115969. [20] Al-Assaf Y, El Kadi H. Fatigue life prediction of unidirectional glass ber/epoxy composite laminae using neural networks. Compos Struct 2001;53:6571. [21] Jang JSR, Sun CT, Mizutani E. Neuro-fuzzy and soft computing: a computational approach to learning and machine intelligence. Englewood Clis, NJ: Prentice-Hall; 1997. [22] Haykin S. Neural networks A comprehensive foundation. New York: McMillan; 1994. [23] El Kadi H. Analysis and failure of ber reinforced composites. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 1993. [24] NeuroSolutions software www.nd.com, 2000.

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H. El Kadi, Y. Al-Assaf / Composite Structures 55 (2002) 239246 design, manufacturing as well as composite materials. His research interests are in fatigue and fracture of composite materials as well as the eect of processing on their mechanical properties and the use of articial neural networks to predict their failure. Yousef Al-Assaf has a B.Sc. in Control Engineering from Sussex University in the UK. and a DPhil from Oxford University in the UK. He was an Assistant Professor and is now an Associate Professor at the University of Jordan. While in Jordan, he spent ve years as the director of the Outreach Consultation Project. Currently, he is on leave at the American University of Sharjah. His research interests are in fuzzy, predictive and neural network modeling as well as control.

[25] Al-Assaf Y, El Kadi H. Comparison of Various Neural Networks Models for Fatigue Life Prediction of Composite Materials. In: Third Canadian International Composites Conference Montreal; 2001. p. 28997. Hany El Kadi is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the American University of Sharjah. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta, AB, Canada. He worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Composite Materials Engineering at Winona State University, MN, USA and then at the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, AZ, USA. For the last few years, he has been lecturing on mechanics,