This week, we put together our design presentation which was given by Mahati on Monday. I completed the use-case requirements, data processing pipeline, testing and verification, and schedule slides and assisted with the design requirements and risk mitigation slides. We had a successful presentation and the only commentary we received from our supervising professor was that we should only focus on steel ductwork and not include the fiberglass ductboard because we have plenty of other components to focus on for our MVP.
I also read more academic articles to figure out what type of AE sensor we should purchase and made notes on their operating frequency and amplified frequency. I have found an AE sensor and Adithi has put in the purchase order. I have also looked more into the feature processing, including which features to extract from the raw audio and how to do this. In past weeks, we thought we would focus on corrosion and leaks, but we have since shifted towards corrosion and cracks. Therefore, I have found a couple features that would be best in indicating cracks. I have completed a table of these features and methods to extract them. I must make sure that the features I have chosen are significant enough for the model to accurately classify the defects from healthy ducts and tell corrosion and cracks apart from each other. My current research indicates that sharp changes in any of the features indicate a crack while more slow changes indicate corrosion.
I have begun coding the acoustic signal processing pipeline in Matlab, using built-in functions for FFT, mean, standard deviation, and other common algorithms. This pipeline is a rough draft and is subject to change in the future after I have collected acoustic emission data.
Next Steps:
I have to begin the process of creating corrosion and cracks on the HVAC duct provided by the trade school. I must also inspect this duct for previous degradation. Simultaneously, I will begin the signal processing pipeline. Hopefully, by the end of the week, the duct will be prepped and I can begin collecting data to test the pipeline.
My work for this week can be found here: Progress for 2/21