Abstract:To find the analytical solution of the acoustic emission/microseismic(AE/MS) source location coordinates, the sensor location coordinates were optimized and simplified. A cube monitoring network of sensor location was selected, and the AE/MS source localization equations were established. A location method with P-wave velocity by analytical solutions (P-VAS) was obtained with these equations. The virtual location tests show that the relocation results of analytical method are fully consistent with the actual coordinates for events both inside and outside the monitoring network; whereas the location error of traditional time difference method is between 0.01 and 0.03 m for events inside the sensor array, and the location errors are larger, which is up to 1080986 m for events outside the sensor array. The broken pencil location tests were carried out in the cross section of 100 mm×98 mm, 350 mm-length granite rock specimen using five AE sensors. Five AE sources were relocated with the conventional method and the P-VAS method. For the four events outside monitoring network, the positioning accuracy by P-VAS method is higher than that by the traditional method, and the location accuracy of the larger one can be increased by 17.61 mm. The results of both virtual and broken pencil location tests show that the proposed analytical solution is effective to improve the positioning accuracy. It can locate the coordinates of AE/MS source only using simple four arithmetic operations, without determining the fitting initial value and iterative calculation, which can be solved by a conventional calculator or Microsoft Excel.

Key words: acoustic emission; seismic source; sensor; location; analytical solution