Acoustic emission localization on a large anisotropic composite plate

A novel acoustic emission location approach was presented for large anisotropic composite plates with unknown lay-up and wave velocity. The proposed algorithm was based on the differences of acoustic emission signals measured by four piezoelectric sensors surface-bonded in a small area. Wavelet scale spectrum combined with cubic splines interpolation was employed to obtain the time of arrivals (TOA) of different acoustic emission signals. Then, the source location would be identified by solving a set of non-linear equations. The performance of the proposed approach was validated through pencil-lead breaks performed on a large anisotropic composite plate. The results conclusively demonstrated that the proposed method can obtain a reasonable accuracy (maximum error was approximately 3%) when the distance between acoustic source and the origin of coordinates was more than 120 mm.