Acoustic Emission Source Localization using Deep Transfer Learning and Finite Element Modeling–based Knowledge Transfer

This paper presents a novel data-driven approach to localize two types of acoustic emission sources in an aluminum plate, namely a Hsu-Nielsen source, which simulates a crack-like source, and steel ball impacts of varying diameters acting as the impact source. While deep neural networks have shown promise in previous studies, achieving high accuracy requires a large amount of training data, which may not always be feasible. To address this challenge, we investigated the applicability of transfer learning to address the issue of limited training data. Our approach involves transferring knowledge learned from numerical modeling to the experimental domain to localize nine different source locations. In the process, we evaluated six deep learning architectures using tenfold cross-validation and demonstrated the potential of transfer learning for efficient acoustic emission source localization, even with limited experimental data. This study contributes to the growing demand for running deep learning models with limited capacity and training time and highlights the promise of transfer learning methods such as fine-tuning pretrained models on large semi-related datasets.