  The intelligent acoustic emission locator is described in Part I, while Part
II discusses blind source separation, time delay estimation and location of two
simultaneously active continuous acoustic emission sources.
  The location of acoustic emission on complicated aircraft frame structures is
a difficult problem of non-destructive testing. This article describes an
intelligent acoustic emission source locator. The intelligent locator comprises
a sensor antenna and a general regression neural network, which solves the
location problem based on learning from examples. Locator performance was
tested on different test specimens. Tests have shown that the accuracy of
location depends on sound velocity and attenuation in the specimen, the
dimensions of the tested area, and the properties of stored data. The location
accuracy achieved by the intelligent locator is comparable to that obtained by
the conventional triangulation method, while the applicability of the
intelligent locator is more general since analysis of sonic ray paths is
avoided. This is a promising method for non-destructive testing of aircraft
frame structures by the acoustic emission method.
