Source localization of multiple impacts in a plate

Source localization technology (SLT) for impact loads in a plate structure has been used for health monitoring, damage identication, fatigue analysis, human-interaction technology, etc. Much research on source localization has been focused only on the localization of single impacts. This article presents novel research into the source localization of multiple impacts. It is difficult to localize the sources of multiple impacts using current SLT because of the overlapping of dispersive waves induced by multiple impacts and the reflection of those waves from the edge of the plate. The new method functions by solving the overlapping problem and the reflection problem. These two problems are solved by adopting pre-signal processing based on band pass filtering and linear-prediction filtering. The method is applied to the localization of multiple impacts on an isotropic plate. Results from numerical simulation and from experimentation are presented and these verify the capability of the proposed method.