Near-field beamforming performance analysis for acoustic emission source localization

This paper attempts to study the localization performance of a near-field acoustic emission (AE) beamforming by varying parameters such as array types, localization velocity, the maximum diameter of the array and the sensor spacing. To investigate how those parameters affect localization performance, an improved finite element method is established to obtain AE signals which take real propagation characteristics and have high signal to noise ratio. And AE signals of the finite element simulation under different parameters are obtained based on the presented method. Then AE beamforming is used to localize AE sources, and the influences of these parameters on the AE beamforming localization performing are analyzed. The results indicate that the parameters have impact on the localization accuracy clearly. This work can provide a reference for the selection of parameters when the beamforming is used to localize AE sources.