Acoustic Emission Source Location Using Finite Element Generated Delta-T Mapping

Abstract

Supplementary Materials: The following are available online at www.mdpi.com/xxx/s1, Figure S1: 505 title, Table S1: title, Video S1: title.Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. One of the most significant benefits of Acoustic Emission (AE) testing over other Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) techniques lies in its damage location capability over a wide area. The delta-T mapping technique developed by researchers has been shown to enable AE source location to a high level of accuracy in complex structures. However, the time-consuming and laborious data training process of the delta-T mapping technique has prevented this technique from large-scale application on large complex structures. In order to solve this problem, a Finite Element (FE) method was applied to model training data for localization of experimental AE events on a complex plate. Firstly, the FE model was validated through demonstrating consistency between simulated data and the experimental data in the study of Hsu-Nielsen (H-N) sources on a simple plate. Then, the FE model with the same parameters was applied to a planar location problem on a complex plate. It has been demonstrated that FE generated delta-T mapping data can achieve a reasonable degree of source location accuracy with an average error of 3.88 mm whilst decreasing the time and effort required for manually collecting and processing the training data.Lloyd's 513 Register Foundation; Brunel University London; National Structural Integrity Research Centre, NSIRC studentship - Condition bases monitoring techniques for the early identification of stress corrosion cracking