Feature Fusion and CNN-Based Acoustic-Emission Diagnosis for Aero-Engine Initial Damage

Acoustic emission (AE) signals generated by incipient aero-engine damage are usually weak, intermittent, and highly dependent on sensor position, which makes diagnosis based on a single channel unreliable. To address this issue, this paper develops a multi-sensor AE diagnosis framework that combines entropy-guided feature fusion with a convolutional neural network (CNN). Time-domain and frequency-domain descriptors are first extracted from AE waveforms collected by multiple sensors. The consistency of each feature type across channels is then evaluated using feature entropy. Features with lower entropy are considered more informative for damage discrimination and are therefore retained for fusion. Based on the normalized channel contributions of these selected features, an adaptive weighted fusion matrix is constructed and used as the input to the CNN. The method is validated on a self-built aero-engine structural test rig equipped with 12 AE sensors. Fifteen representative initial-damage cases are designed, including signal excitation, crack-like excitation simulated by pencil-lead break (PLB), and impact-induced micro-deformation cases. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves a best average classification accuracy of 96.80% and provides more balanced class-wise performance than conventional machine-learning and deep-learning baselines. Additional noise-injection tests further indicate that the method maintains good robustness over a wide signal-to-noise-ratio range. These results suggest that entropy-guided multi-sensor AE fusion is a practical solution for intelligent diagnosis of aero-engine initial damage.