Estimation of residual stress in dissimilar metals welding using deep fuzzy neural networks with rule-dropout

Welding processes are used to connect several components in nuclear power plants. These welding processes can induce residual stress in welding joints, which has been identified as a significant factor in primary water stress corrosion cracking. Consequently, the assessment of welding residual stress plays a crucial role in determining the structural integrity of welded joints. In this study, a deep fuzzy neural networks (DFNN) with a rule-dropout method, which is an artificial intelligence (AI) method, was used to predict the residual stress of dissimilar metal welding. ABAQUS, a finite element analysis program, was used as the data collection tool to develop the AI model, and 6300 data instances were collected under 150 analysis conditions. A rule-dropout method and genetic algorithm were used to optimize the estimation performance of the DFNN model. DFNN with the rule-dropout model was compared to a deep neural network method, known as a general deep learning method, to evaluate the estimation performance of DFNN. In addition, a fuzzy neural network method and a cascaded support vector regression method conducted in previous studies were compared. Consequently, the estimation performance of the DFNN with the rule-dropout model was better than those of the comparison methods. The welding residual stress estimation results of this study are expected to contribute to the evaluation of the structural integrity of welded joints.