Constrained total least squares method using TDOA measurements for jointly estimating acoustic emission source and wave velocity

Abstract

The measurements of time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) and wave velocity have significant influence on localization accuracy. To reduce the loss in localization accuracy induced by TDOA noises and velocity errors, the constrained total least squares (CTLS) method using the TDOA measurements for jointly estimating AE source and wave velocity is proposed in this paper. The proposed method exploits the CTLS principle of unknown wave velocity, and the Newton's iterative method is combined to give the optimal solution. The simulation tests are implemented to quantitatively analyze the performance of the proposed method, and the results show that the location accuracy and velocity accuracy of the proposed method are optimal and can attain the Cramér–Rao lower bound (CRLB). In addition, the experiment results of pencil-lead breaks further indicate that the proposed method can achieve higher positioning accuracy than traditional methods with a relatively low computational cost.