Determination of the probability zone for acoustic emission source location in cylindrical shell structures

• We present a new algorithm based on unscented transformation for AE source location in cylindrical shell structures.
• The proposed approach can take into account uncertainty in time of flight measurements and wave velocity.
• The accuracy of the proposed framework demonstrate its potential application for real-time SHM applications.

This paper presents a probabilistic framework for acoustic emission (AE) source localization in cylindrical structures. Specifically, an approach based on unscented transformation (UT) is proposed to take into account uncertainty in time of flight measurements and wave velocity and eventually estimate AE source locations together with quantitative measures of confidence associated with those estimates. Experiments are carried out on a steel pipe instrumented with an array of six embedded piezoelectric disks. Results are compared with Monte Carlo simulations by the Kullback–Leibler divergence.