A new approach for acoustic emission (AE) source type identification based on harmonic wavelet packet (HWPT) feature extraction and hierarchy support vector machine (H-SVM) classifier is proposed for solving the fatigue damage identification problem of helicopter moving component. In this approach, HWPT is employed to extract the energy feature of AE signals on different frequency bands, as well as to reduce the dimensionality of original data features. We trained the H-SVM classifier on a subset of the experimental data for known AE source type, and then tested on the remaining set of data. Also, the pressure off experiment on specimen of carbon fiber materials is investigated. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can implement AE source type identification effectively, and achieves better performance on computational efficiency and identification accuracy than wavelet packet (WPT) feature extraction and RBF neural network classification
