With the widespread application of acoustic emission (AE) technology in geotechnical engineering, effectively separating and identifying dense AE signals generated during rock fracturing remains a critical challenge. This study proposes an AE event identification technique based on waveform energy envelopes and multi-indicator characteristic parameters. First, the waveform energy envelope is used to adaptively segment dense and partially overlapping AE waveforms without relying on fixed timing parameters. Then, a template sliding-window scan integrating waveform correlation, ring count, rise time, and signal energy is performed to identify candidate AE events. In addition, a time-difference correction and window-stacking strategy is adopted to improve multi-channel arrival picking. Experimental validation on representative single-peak single-event and double-peak multi-waveform cases extracted from laboratory rock-failure tests demonstrates that the proposed method can effectively separate and identify AE waveforms under the tested conditions. Compared with conventional timing-parameter-based segmentation and correlation-dominated matching, the proposed workflow is more robust to waveform attenuation and distortion. The method provides a methodological basis for AE waveform identification and arrival-time extraction in rock-failure monitoring and has potential to support early warning after further validation.
Li et al. (Wed,) studied this question.