Use of Advanced A.E. Analysis for Source Discrimination Using Captured Waveforms

Abstract

Conventional methods of acquiring and using acoustic emission (AE) discard the raw signal waveform after extracting signal features from it. The main reason for this is the number of bytes required to save hundreds of thousands of AE waveforms, using a modern high speed multichannel system the hard-drive may be quickly filled. One side effect of this “feature extraction” approach is that information is thrown away with the wave-form. The advent of systems capable of acquiring AE waveforms on all channels has opened up the opportunity to use this extra data to get more information about the source and the transmission path. This paper describes the use of acoustic emission waveforms to aid source discrimination, and presents data acquired during pressure testing of a slug-catcher.