Acoustic emission source location considering refraction in layered media with cylindrical surface

Abstract To solve the problem that the existing acoustic emission (AE) source location algorithms cannot always obtain accurate results for multilayer cylindrical media, a new acoustic emission source location method considering refraction was proposed. AE source coordinates were solved by the complex method. Pencil-lead-break experiments were used to verify this method. The absolute distance errors of location results are less than 3 mm, much less than those by the traditional method. The numerical experiments were used to further analyze factors that affect location accuracy. The results of numerical experiments show that the location accuracy of the proposed method is not affected by the ratio of wave velocities but affected by the measurement accuracy of wave velocity. These results show that new method can obtain accurate AE source location in the two-layered cylindrical surface media such as the triaxial compression test.