Estimation of Acoustic Source Positioning Error Determined by One-Dimensional Linear Location Technique

Abstract

The one-dimensional (1D) linear location technique has been considered as one of the methods for determining the position of acoustic emission (AE) sources in metallic objects. However, this approach does not take into account the heterogeneity of materials and that leads to poor accuracy of AE sources localization. To estimate the positioning error of the linear location technique which is typically used to determine the AE source location a new approach based on the combination of experimental and simulation methods is proposed. This approach for error estimation contains a finite element model construction of the AE signals localization. The model consists of transmitting and receiving transducers mounted on the test object, the frequency response of which selected close to the characteristics of acoustic emission transducers applied in the preliminary experiments. The application of the approach in current research showed that a reduced positioning error on a flat steel plate reaches 15%. The proposed technique can be used to optimize the number of preliminary tests required to calculate the reduced error of the 1D linear location technique applied for the AE sources localization during the inspection of the structure.

Keywords

• acoustic emission
• linear location technique
• positioning error
• finite element modeling
• frequency response