Analysis and efficient onset time detection of acoustic emission signals with power constrained sensor platforms

In this paper we describe our custom designed, low-power, intelligent sensor platform, and a novel analysis approach for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). More specifically we show how Acoustic Emission (AE) signals were recorded during aluminium and steel beam break tests utilizing two channels on our MarmotE platform, and how subsequent low-resource but accurate onset time detection yielded Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) results. We also demonstrate a new, simplified method to pick valid AE events from a vast set of noisy measurements, and prove the feasibility of our ideas by showing that our approach provided results comparable to widely used industry methods with modest resource requirements.