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Abstract
An easy to use, fast to apply, cost-effective, and very accurate non-destructive testing (NDT) technique for damage localisation in complex structures is key for the uptake of structural health monitoring systems (SHM). Acoustic emission (AE) is a viable technique that can be used for SHM and one of the most attractive features is the ability to locate AE sources. The time of arrival (TOA) technique is traditionally used to locate AE sources, and relies on the assumption of constant wave speed within the material and uninterrupted propagation path between the source and the sensor. In complex structural geometries and complex materials such as composites, this assumption is no longer valid. Delta T mapping was developed in Cardiff in order to overcome these limitations; this technique uses artificial sources on an area of interest to create training maps. These are used to locate subsequent AE sources. However operator expertise is required to select the best data from the training maps and to choose the correct parameter to locate the sources, which can be a time consuming process.This paper presents a new and improved fully automatic delta T mapping technique where a clustering algorithm is used to automatically identify and select the highly correlated events at each grid point whilst the “Minimum Difference” approach is used to determine the source location. This removes the requirement for operator expertise, saving time and preventing human errors. A thorough assessment is conducted to evaluate the performance and the robustness of the new technique. In the initial test, the results showed excellent reduction in running time as well as improved accuracy of locating AE sources, as a result of the automatic selection of the training data. Furthermore, because the process is performed automatically, this is now a very simple and reliable technique due to the prevention of the potential source of error related to manual manipulation.
Highlights
Acoustic emission (AE) is a non-destructive testing (NDT) technique concerned with the passive monitoring of ultrasonic stress waves emitted from a variety of sources in a structure [1]
The objective of this paper is to extend the previous work on the Delta T Mapping (DTM) technique [26,27,28,29] and create a fully automatic technique which reduces human input and increases accuracy, reliability and the speed of the process
This area is located at around 15 mm from the location of the actual crack. These results show the high accuracy of the two mapping techniques in calculating the AE source location and significanctly lower resource requirement of the new technique
Summary
Acoustic emission (AE) is a non-destructive testing (NDT) technique concerned with the passive monitoring of ultrasonic stress waves emitted from a variety of sources in a structure [1]. There are a variety of sources that cause AE which include n Corresponding author at: Cardiff School of Engineering, Cardiff University, Queen’s Buildings, The Parade, Cardiff CF24 3AA, UK.
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