Research on Vibration Fatigue Damage Locations of Offshore Oil and Gas Pipelines Based on the GA-Improved BP Neural Network

Abstract

To study vibration fatigue damage localization of offshore oil and gas pipelines, aiming at the location error caused by uncertainty of the initial parameters in backpropagation (BP) neural network training, an improved BP neural network based on the genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to locate pipeline damage. This approach was verified by experiments and simulations. First, a BP neural network for structural damage location was constructed, and a method to optimize the BP neural network parameters based on the GA was established. Then, a finite element model was established based on the measured data from modal tests of a physical pipeline model, and a large number of vibration neural network training samples were obtained using the finite element model. Finally, to show that the improved BP neural network based on the GA had a better damage location accuracy, the location results of the original BP and GA BP methods were compared for cases with no noise and with 5% noise. The results show that the average error of the BP neural network based on the GA was less than 3%, which was 11.6% lower than that of the original BP neural network.