Acoustic emission localization in plates with dispersion and reverberations using sparse PZT sensors in passive mode

A strategy for the localization of acoustic emissions (AE) in plates with dispersion and reverberation is proposed. The procedure exploits signals received in passive mode by sparse conventional piezoelectric transducers and a three-step processing framework. The first step consists in a signal dispersion compensation procedure, which is achieved by means of the warped frequency transform. The second step concerns the estimation of the differences in arrival time (TDOA) of the acoustic emission at the sensors. Complexities related to reflections and plate resonances are overcome via a wavelet decomposition of cross-correlating signals where the mother function is designed by a synthetic warped cross-signal. The magnitude of the wavelet coefficients in the warped distance–frequency domain, in fact, precisely reveals the TDOA of an acoustic emission at two sensors. Finally, in the last step the TDOA data are exploited to locate the acoustic emission source through hyperbolic positioning. The proposed procedure is tested with a passive network of three/four piezo-sensors located symmetrically and asymmetrically with respect to the plate edges. The experimentally estimated AE locations are close to those theoretically predicted by the Cramèr–Rao lower bound.