Two-stage processing system for the detection and on-site localization of acoustic emissions

In this paper a system of two-stage processing for the detection of acoustic emissions and the localization of the sources is presented. The first stage is programmed in LabVIEW and is dedicated to the detection. A second stage is programmed in Matlab and is devoted to the localization. They are connected by a packet-transfer protocol, which also provides of communication for a remote operation. This system combines the advantages of LabVIEW for the multichannel acquisition and denoising of signals and the advantages of Matlab for the data processing. Additionally, several methods of solving the localization equations system have been described and tested. Different solution strategies are compared. The figure of merit is the precision over the runtime. The indirect non-interactive method and the particle-swarm-optimization method provide the best results under conditions of noisy detection.