Physics-Informed Sinusoidal Representation Networks for Damage Identification in Ultrasonic Guided Wave Structural Health Monitoring
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Ultrasonic guided wave (UGW) inspection has become an effective method in structural health monitoring (SHM). While machine learning has enhanced damage detection capabilities, purely data-driven models remain constrained by extensive labeled datasets and limited physical interpretability. Standard multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) further suffer from spectral bias (F-Principle) in high-frequency regimes, prioritizing low-frequency components while failing to resolve the high-frequency oscillations critical for UGW reconstruction. Physics-Informed Sinusoidal Representation Networks (PI-SIRENs) address these limitations by embedding governing partial differential equations directly into the training process. Building upon SIRENs, which utilize periodic activation functions to inherently capture high-frequency spectral content, the proposed framework is designed to operate effectively in sparse ultrasonic measurement regimes. This work introduces a frequency-domain PI-SIREN framework tailored for the Mindlin-Reissner plate theory to reconstruct ultrasonic wavefields without temporal discretization. The model parameters are optimized using a hybrid strategy comprising three phases: first-order Adam, residual-adaptive refinement (RAR) and quasi-Newton L-BFGS. Numerical and experimental evaluations confirm that the model serves as a physics-consistent baseline derived from sparse data, functioning as a computationally efficient surrogate for damage identification in SHM and non-destructive testing (NDT). Integrating the surrogate into a damage identification pipeline detects and localizes a milled notch from sparse experimental measurements with a localization error of 1 % of the plate diagonal. In contrast, data-driven benchmarks and MLPs with hyperbolic tangent activation functions, with and without Fourier feature embedding, are unable to identify damage due to higher reconstruction errors.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Language: English
Subfield: Mechanics of Materials
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225760020