Intelligent location of simultaneously active acoustic emission sources: Part I Available to Purchase

The intelligent acoustic emission (AE) locator is described in Part I while Part II discusses a blind source separation, time delay estimation and location of two simultaneously active continuous AE sources. Location of AE on complicated aircraft frame structures is a difficult problem of non‐destructive testing. In this article an intelligent AE source locator is described. The intelligent locator is comprised of a sensor antenna and a general regression neural network, that solves the location problem based on learning from examples. The locator performance was tested on different test specimens. The tests have shown that accuracy of location depends on sound velocity and attenuation in the specimen, the dimensions of tested area, and properties of stored data. The location accuracy achieved by the intelligent locator is comparable to that obtained by the conventional triangulation method. This is a promising method for non‐destructive testing by AE method of aircraft frame structures.