Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Acoustic Emission Source Localization Using an Enhanced Guided Wave Phased Array Method

Abstract

To detect damage in mechanical structures, acoustic emission (AE) inspection is considered as a powerful tool. Generally, the classical acoustic emission detection method uses a sparse sensor array to identify damage and its location. It often depends on a pre-defined wave velocity and it is difficult to yield a high localization accuracy for complicated structures using this method. In this paper, the passive guided wave phased array method, a dense sensor array method, is studied, aiming to obtain better AE localization accuracy in aluminum thin plates. Specifically, the proposed method uses a cross-shaped phased array enhanced with four additional far-end sensors for AE source localization. The proposed two-step method first calculates the real-time velocity and the polar angle of the AE source using the phased array algorithm, and then solves the location of the AE source with the additional far-end sensor. Both numerical and physical experiments on an aluminum flat panel are carried out to validate the proposed method. It is found that using the cross-shaped guided wave phased array method with enhanced far-end sensors can localize the coordinates of the AE source accurately without knowing the wave velocity in advance. The proposed method is also extended to a stiffened thin-walled structure with high localization accuracy, which validates its AE source localization ability for complicated structures. Finally, the influences of cross-shaped phased array element number and the time window length on the proposed method are discussed in detail.