Acoustic source localization in non-homogenous plates

In a nonhomogeneous specimen, if the acoustic source and receiving sensors are located in different media then the acoustic source localization becomes very difficult. In this paper, a recently developed source localization technique is extended to non-homogeneous plates by appropriately considering and modeling the refraction phenomenon. The modified technique is applied to two-layered structure. The proposed new technique gives a relatively simple way to localize the acoustic source without the need to solve a system of nonlinear equations, and thus it avoids the problem of multiplicity, converging to local minima instead of global minimum and giving wrong solution. The proposed technique works for both isotropic and anisotropic structures. The finite element simulation shows that this modified technique considering refraction at material interfaces can localize the acoustic source better than when this modification is not considered.