Mixture Model Approach for Acoustic Emission Control of Cylindrical Pressure Equipment

In this paper, we present a new and original mixture model approach for acoustic emission (AE) data clustering. AE techniques have been used in a variety of applications in industrial plants. These techniques can provide the most sophisticated monitoring test and can generally be done with the plant/pressure equipment operating at several conditions. Since the AE clusters may present several constraints (different proportions, volumes, orientations, and shapes), we propose to base the AE cluster analysis on Gaussian mixture models, which will be, in such situations, a powerful approach. Furthermore, the diagonal Gaussian mixture model seems to be well adapted to the detection and monitoring of defect classes since the weldings of cylindrical pressure equipment are lengthened horizontally and vertically (cluster shapes lengthened along the axes). The EM (Expectation-Maximization) algorithm applied to a diagonal Gaussian mixture model provides a satisfactory solution but the real time constraints imposed in our problem make the application of this algorithm impossible if the number of points becomes too big. The solution that we propose is to use the CEM (Classification Expectation-Maximization) algorithm, which converges faster and generates comparable solutions in terms of resulting partition. The practical results on real data are very satisfactory from the experts point of view.