A novel acoustic emission beamforming method with two uniform linear arrays on plate-like structures

A novel acoustic emission (AE) source localization approach based on beamforming with two uniform linear arrays is proposed, which can localize acoustic sources without accurate velocity, and is particularly suited for plate-like structures. Two uniform line arrays are distributed in the x-axis direction and y-axis direction. The accurate x and y coordinates of AE source are determined by the two arrays respectively. To verify the location accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approach, the simulation of AE wave propagation in a steel plate based on the finite element method and the pencil-lead-broken experiment are conducted, and the AE signals obtained from the simulations and experiments are analyzed using the proposed method. Moreover, to study the ability of the proposed method more comprehensive, a plate of carbon fiber reinforced plastics is taken for the pencil-lead-broken test, and the AE source localization is also realized. The results indicate that the two uniform linear arrays can localize different sources accurately in two directions even though the localizing velocity is deviated from the real velocity, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method in AE source localization for plate-like structures. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.