Predictive maintenance with machine learning on weld joint analysed by ultrasound

Ever since the first industrial revolution industries have had the goal to increase their production. With new technology such as CPS, AI and IoT industries today are going through the fourth industrial revolution denoted as industry 4.0. The new technology not only revolutionises production, but also maintenance, making predictive maintenance possible. Predictive maintenance seeks to predict when failure would occur, instead of having scheduled maintenance or maintenance after failure already occurred. In this report a convolutional neural network (CNN) will analyse data from an ultrasound machine scanning a weld joint. The data from the ultrasound machine will be transformed by the short time Fourier transform in order to create an image for the CNN. Since the data from the ultrasound is not complete, simulated data will be created and investigated as another option for training the network. The results are promising, however the lack of data makes it hard to show any concrete proof.