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.
