A New Algebraic Solution for Acoustic Emission Source Localization without Premeasuring Wave Velocity

The technique of acoustic emission (AE) source localization is critical for studying material failure mechanism and predicting the position of potential hazards. Most existing positioning methods heavily depend on the premeasured wave velocity and are not suitable for complex engineering practices where the wave velocity changes dynamically. To reduce the influence of measurement error of wave velocity on location accuracy, this paper proposes a new algebraic solution for AE source localization without premeasuring wave velocity. In this method, the nonlinear TDOA equations are established and linearized by introducing two intermediate variables. Then, by minimizing the sum of squared residuals of the linear TDOA equations with respect to the AE source coordinate and two intermediate variables separately, the optimal algebraic solution of the AE source coordinate in the least squares sense is obtained. A pencil-lead breaks experiment is performed to validate the positioning effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the new method improves the positioning accuracy by more than 40% compared with two pre-existing methods, and the minimum positioning accuracy of the proposed method can reach 1.12 mm. Moreover, simulation tests are conducted to further verify the location performance of the proposed method under different TDOA errors and the number of sensors.