A Technique for Detecting Materials Characteristics using Mechanical Impacts and a Multilayer Neural Network

In this paper, we propose a method for detecting the characteristics of different materials that have similar properties, by classifying their responses when impacted with small hard spheres. First, a signal conditioning and data compression stage are described. Then a multilayer neural network is used to detect the individual patterns of the samples, and classify the signal. The results of this study indicate that it is possible to identify different materials propertied when the signals are correctly acquired and preprocessed, and the network is adequately trained.