It was investigated how to take into account the modal nature of AE (Acoustic Emission) signals to reduce the number of sensors needed in AE source localization. To this end, the theory of the chirplet transform and modal acoustic emission are used to analyze the propagation of elastic waves in thin plates. First, the chirplet transform and the dispersion curves of the fundamental Lamb wave modes are utilized to separate the first-arrived modes and to estimate the distance between a source and a sensor. Then an analytical model is developed to simulate their late-arrived wave packets. Finally the correlations between the experimental and the simulated waveform are used to estimate the location of AE source. To validate the proposed source localization algorithm, experiments were performed on a steel plate using Hsu-Nielsen pencil lead break (PLB) test. Results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively localize AE source regardless of the location of the sources.
Read full abstract