Method for the P-wave arrival pickup of rock fracture acoustic emission signals under strong noise

Abstract This research aimed to investigate the accuracy of picking of P-wave arrival times in rock fracture acoustic emission signals. In order to simulate the mining scenario, Gaussian white noise and pulse noise were added to the data collected in the laboratory. Complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise + Wavelet (CEEMDAN + Wavelet) was improved in this paper, where the Spearman rank correlation coefficient was adopted to effectively select intrinsic mode functions for denoising which retained the inherent characteristics of the rock fracture signal. The absolute amplitude and energy change rate of the envelope signal, calculated based on the Hilbert transform, were used as the input of the short term average/long term average (STA/LTA) normalization algorithm to pickup the P-wave arrival time. The reliability of this method was tested on 30 groups of recorded rock fracture laboratory data and 60 groups of added noise data. Taking the manual pickup results as the standard, the errors of CEEMDAN + Wavelet + STA/LTA + AIC (Akaike information criterion) method with the absolute amplitude of the signal as the input are all within 10 ms, and 86.67% of the results are within 5 ms. The method proposed in this paper effectively addressing the issue of false pickup caused by the sensitivity of AIC and traditional STA/LTA method for strong noise, and achieving relatively high accuracy and stability in processing low signal-to-noise ratio signals. This work contributes to monitor microscopic changes in rock bodies and is of great significance for the prediction and monitoring of geological disasters.