Comparative study between EKF and Geometrical methods for the Acoustic Emission source localization

The purpose of this paper is to optimize and apply probabilistic methods and compare the obtained results to geometric method for locating acoustic emission (AE) source in a plate-like structure. The time of arrival (TOA) of the AE waves in each sensor taking into account the uncertainties, was determined by the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). Then the group wave’s velocity was calculated by Monte Carlo simulation. As a probabilistic method, the extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used to iteratively estimate the location of AE sources. Experimental results have shown that the probabilistic method estimates the location of the pencil lead break better than the geometric method.