Prediction of the point of impact in an anisotropic plate

Locating the point of impact of a foreign object in a plate is important for continuous health monitoring of structures. A new method based on an optimization scheme has been recently proposed to locate the point of impact in anisotropic plates by analyzing the times of arrival of the ultrasonic signals at the passive sensors attached to the plate. Following this optimization based technique, in this paper the impact point on an anisotropic plate is predicted from the acoustic emission data. Experiments are carried out with a carbon-epoxy plate where the impact point is modeled by an acoustic source. A Parallel Pre-stressed Actuator (PPA) is used as the acoustic source and the acoustic signals at different locations are received by adhesively bonded acoustic sensors. The source point is then predicted and compared with its actual location. Related theory is also presented in the paper.