Space debris poses a safety hazard to the operation of spacecraft, and the study of impact localization for spacecraft structures is of significance for the timely discovery of the impact location and the safeguarding of spacecraft and personnel safety. However, existing studies have mainly focused on continuous structures, and discontinuous structures of spacecraft with portholes and orifice-containing valves have been understudied. Therefore, in this article, the shortest propagation path algorithm of the signal and the acoustic emission source localization method applicable to multi-holes discontinuities structures are proposed. After calculating the signal arrival time difference, the localization method calculates the shortest propagation path of Lamb wave in complex multi-holes structure by the heuristic adaptive path-finding algorithm, which calculates distance differences traveled by the signal propagation to each sensor. The heuristic adaptive path-finding algorithm first constructs a map set based on the geometrical features of the structure, after which it searches for each partial path in the final path by heuristic computation to identify the shortest signal propagation trajectory. The objective function is established based on the target structural characteristics and sensor position parameters, of which the parameters of the equations are optimized based on the new travel difference-of-distance values generated from the results of the heuristic adaptive pathfinding calculation. Finally, the acoustic emission source coordinates are updated with a gradient descent strategy, which has an average localization error of 0.956 cm in 252 experiments and can effectively realize the impact localization calculation of multi-holes complex structures.
