Global Mechanical Response Sensing of Corrugated Compensators Based on Digital Twins

Abstract

The corrugated compensators are important components in the piping system, absorbing mechanical deformation flexibly. To reduce the risk of the piping system with corrugated compensators and improve the safety and stability of industrial equipment, condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of bellows is necessary. However, the stress monitoring method of corrugated compensators with limited localized sensors lack real-time and full-domain sensing. Therefore, this paper proposes a digital twin construction method for global mechanical response sensing of corrugated compensators, combining Gaussian process regression in machine learning and finite element analysis. The sensing data of three types of displacements are used as the associated information of a finite element model with 19,800 elements and its digital twin. The results show that the values of performance metrics correlation of determination R2 and standardized average leave-one-out cross-validation CVavg of the digital twin satisfy the recommended threshold, which indicates that the digital twin has excellent predictive performance. The single prediction time of the digital twin is 0.76% of the time spent on finite element analysis, and the prediction result has good consistency with the true response under dynamic input, indicating that the digital twin can achieve fast and accurate stress field prediction. The important state information hidden in the multi-source data obtained by limited sensors is effectively mined to achieve the real-time prediction of the stress field. This paper provides a new approach for intelligent sensing and feedback of corrugated compensators in the piping system.