Fractional Fourier Transform Based Adaptive Filtering Techniques for Acoustic Emission Signal Enhancement

Acoustic emission technique (AET) is a well-known non-destructive testing method used for the detection of crack growth and monitoring structural integrity of components. The main limitation in the application of AET is the fact that acoustic emission (AE) signal is often affected by background noise. A new approach is proposed in this paper to reduce the background noise and to improve the accuracy of AE signal detection. Various noise reduction methods have been applied and studied for AE signal enhancement so far. Some of the studies proved that self-adaptive noise cancellation (SANC) and adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) are better techniques for denoising the AE signal. This paper proposes the use of ANC and SANC schemes based on Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT) for AE signal enhancement. FrFT is the generalization of the classical Fourier Transform (FT). The use of FrFT gives an advantage of an additional degree of freedom (angle of rotation in time-frequency plane) over the traditional Fourier transform and could provide improved performance. In this method, the noisy signal is rotated in time- frequency plane to extract the signal in Fractional Fourier domain (FrFD). Two adaptive filters viz. least mean squares and normalized least mean squares are studied for FrFD based ANC approach. The performance of the proposed method is validated using real AE signals acquired from three different experiments: pencil lead break test, composite drilling test and concrete compression test. Results are compared with the time and frequency domain adaptations. Moreover, the results have also been compared with the frequency domain adaptation techniques. Results have demonstrated that FrFD based ANC approach outperforms the conventional time domain and frequency domain adaptive filtering with an improved signal to noise ratio and significantly reduces mean square error.