Thin spherical shell structures are wildly used as pressure vessels in the industry because of their property of having equal in-plane normal stresses in all directions. Since very large pressure difference between the inside and outside of the wall exists, any formation of defects in the pressure vessel wall has a huge safety risk. Therefore, it is necessary to quickly locate the area where the defect maybe located in the early stage of defect formation and make repair on time. The conventional acoustic source localization techniques for spherical shells require either direction-dependent velocity profile knowledge or a large number of sensors to form an array. In this study, we propose a fast approach for acoustic source localization on thin isotropic and anisotropic spherical shells. A solution technique based on the time difference of arrival on a thin spherical shell without the prior knowledge of direction-dependent velocity profile is provided. With the help of “L”-shaped sensor clusters, only 6 sensors are required to quickly predict the acoustic source location for anisotropic spherical shells. For isotropic spherical shells, only 4 sensors are required. Simulation and experimental results show that this technique works well for both isotropic and anisotropic spherical shells.

薄球壳结构在工业中被广泛用作压力容器，因为它们具有在所有方向上具有相等的面内法向应力的特性。由于壁内外存在非常大的压差，任何在压力容器壁上形成缺陷都会带来巨大的安全隐患。因此，有必要在缺陷形成的早期快速定位可能存在缺陷的区域，并及时进行修复。球壳的传统声源定位技术需要依赖于方向的速度剖面知识或大量传感器来形成阵列。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种在各向同性和各向异性薄球壳上进行声源定位的快速方法。提供了一种基于到达薄球壳的时间差的求解技术，而无需先验与方向相关的速度剖面知识。借助“L”形传感器集群，只需6个传感器即可快速预测各向异性球壳的声源位置。对于各向同性球壳，只需要 4 个传感器。仿真和实验结果表明，该技术适用于各向同性和各向异性球壳。