A Physics-Informed Learning Framework for Linking Microscopic Surface Degradation to Bolted Joint Functional Behavior

Nehal Afifi, Gerhard Kachel, Sven Matthiesen

Returned products in circular engineering often have heterogeneous degradation histories, making remaining function difficult to assess. For bolted joints, corrosion alters surface morphology, contact, friction, preload retention, and mechanical response. This paper presents a physics-informed multimodal framework for linking microscopic and camera-based degradation observations to functional indicators of corroded bolted joints. The workflow defines the corrosion failure mode, generates synchronized inspection and functional-response records, preprocesses image, roughness, exposure, and joint descriptors, aligns microscopy and camera observations through similarity learning, and constructs a calibrated corrosion-severity field. Partial differential equation (PDE) discovery is applied to this field to identify candidate effective mesoscale laws rather than complete electrochemical mechanisms. The corrosion-evolution model is coupled to a separate functional model, with friction coefficient as the primary target and preload loss included when clamp-force data are available. The contribution is a reproducible pathway for physically constrained assessment of degraded bolted-joint…