Acoustic-emission source location using the lower-frequencies of flexural waves

In this paper a novel method for acoustic emission (AE) source location in dispersive media is presented by processing the low-frequency components of the flexural waves arrived in arbitrary positioning transducers. The accurate location of the source is obtained by minimizing the time-domain square error (TDSE) between a model-based AE source signals arrived at any sensor and the real signals. In the multi-variable optimization problem, the huge number of local minima is avoided using modifications in the definition of the TDSE-function and the use of a dedicated simulated annealing method. In the case of thin plates, a three sensors configuration can be used to estimate the AE source position. It has also been showed that the proposed method can be used to determine the AE source position in more complex surfaces even in the presence of additive Gaussian noise in extremely low signal-to-noise ratios.