Acoustic emission source localization of discontinuous cylinder structure based on STFT-energy spectrum

作者：Xiaobo Rui, Shishuai Niu, Jiacheng Liu, Lixin Xu, Lei Qi, Yu Zhang · 发表于：Measurement science and technology · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1088/1361-6501/ae2349 · 研究领域：Physics

To address the challenges posed by complex signal propagation paths in metallic discontinuous structures for impact localization, this study proposes a novel short-time Fourier transform (STFT)-based energy spectrum method combined with path planning and time-difference mapping for impact source localization in cylindrical metallic structures with hollow cavities. The method involves three core steps: first, perform cavity-aware meshing of discontinuous structural regions; second, the acoustic wave propagation paths of all gird points to four sensors is computed to generate theoretical time-of-arrival differences between all six sensor pairs; and finally, STFT-energy spectrum method is applied to compute the theoretical time-of-arrival differences, and absolute differences of gird points between theoretical and experimentally measured time delays are summed across all sensor pairs to form an error-matching matrix, with the grid point exhibiting the minimal total error identified as the impact source. Experimental validation across 228 impact scenarios demonstrated 1.11 cm average localization accuracy and 1.38% relative error, significantly outperforming conventional methods. This method provides a reliable solution for the health monitoring of discontinuous structures with holes.