Time-delay estimation of acoustic emission signals using ICA

Acoustic emission (AE) analysis is used for characterization and location of developing defects in materials. AE sources often generate a mixture of various statistically independent signals. One difficult problem of AE analysis is the separation and characterization of signal components when the signals from various sources and the way in which the signals were mixed are unknown. Recently, blind source separation by independent component analysis (ICA) has been used to solve these problems. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of ICA to time-delay (T-D) estimation of two independent continuous AE sources on an aluminum beam. It is shown that it is possible to estimate T-Ds by ICA, and thus to locate two independent simultaneously emitted sources.