A thermal load identification method based on physics-guided neural network for honeycomb sandwich structures

The identification of thermal load/thermal shock of aircrafts during the service is beneficial for collecting information of the service environment and avoiding risks. In the paper, a method based on multivariate information fusion and physics-guided neural network is developed for the inverse problem of thermal load identification of honeycomb sandwich structures. Two thermal feature parameters: temperature gradient and temperature variation rate are used to build the dataset. A 16-layers physics-guided neural network is presented to achieve the predicted results consistent with physical knowledge. In the work, laser irradiation is used as the thermal load, and two laser parameters are to be identified, i.e., spot diameter, power. Simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The effects of physics-guided loss function and multivariate information fusion are discussed, and it is found that the results based on the proposed method are much better than the results based on the method without physical model. Besides, results based on multivariate information fusion are better than results based on single temperature response. Then, the effects of network models and hyper parameters on the proposed method are also discussed.