Title: Acoustic emission source localization in thin metallic plates: a single-sensor approach based on multimodal edge reflections,
Abstract: This paper presents a new acoustic emission (AE) source localization for
isotropic plates with reflecting boundaries. This approach that has no blind
spot leverages multimodal edge reflections to identify AE sources with only a
single sensor. The implementation of the proposed approach involves three main
steps. First, the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and the dispersion curves
of the fundamental Lamb wave modes are utilized to estimate the distance
between an AE source and a sensor. This step uses a modal acoustic emission
approach. Then, an analytical model is proposed that uses the estimated
distances to simulate the edge-reflected waves. Finally, the correlation
between the experimental and the simulated waveforms is used to estimate the
location of AE sources. Hsu-Nielson pencil lead break (PLB) tests were
performed on an aluminum plate to validate this algorithm and promising results
were achieved. Based on these results, the paper reports the statistics of the
localization errors.