A Deep Learning-Based Method for Stress Measurement Using Longitudinal Critically Refracted Waves

Accurate stress measurement is essential to evaluating structural integrity and plays a pivotal role in the health monitoring and predicting the service life of steel infrastructures. This study proposes a deep learning approach for stress prediction based on longitudinal critically refracted (LCR) ultrasonic waves. The model integrates gated recurrent units (GRU), attention mechanisms, and one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D-CNN), enabling direct stress prediction from raw ultrasonic signals without the need for manual feature extraction or explicit physical modeling. To validate the approach, LCR signals were acquired using a custom-built piezoelectric ultrasonic system from 20# steel specimens subjected to uniaxial stresses ranging from 0 to 200 MPa. A dataset comprising 4200 samples was augmented to enhance training efficiency. The proposed model achieved a mean absolute error of 1.94 MPa. Generalization tests demonstrated high accuracy across diverse stress levels, with average errors below 3 MPa, highlighting the model’s robustness. This research presents an accurate, intelligent, and calibration-free ultrasonic method for stress evaluation, providing practical support for stress evaluation in steel structures under actual operating conditions.