Acoustic emission source location in dispersive media

In this paper, the acoustic emission source (AE) is located by a non-iterative method using the time-of-arrival (TOA) of several events, received in an array of sensors arbitrary positioning in the 3D space. If at least two event velocities are different, a common property in dispersive propagation, and the array of sensors is not lying in a plane, a close-form estimation of the source–sensors distances, AE time and material constant is derived. Moreover, a direct estimation of the source position is achieved using the multidimensional scaling approach. In simulation experiments, the proposed method detects accurately the location of AE sources, reducing also the ambiguity introduced by noisy arrival times.