Abstract: Acoustic emission(AE) technology is an important method for structural damage detection, and AE source location is the most important part of the damage detection. The TDOA location method has the advantages of fast, high efficient and more accurate. An acoustic emission location system based on diamond Fiber Bragg Grating(FBG) sensor array was designed. Wavelet transform and traditional threshold method were used to extract feature signal, and the cross-correlation method was used to obtain the arrival time difference between different sensors. Then, the possible AE source was determined by solving nonlinear equations of the geometric model. Finally, the actual AE source was determined according to the feature of time difference. This location system can effectively avoid the pseudo AE source. The 10 groups of test data were carried out in the monitoring area with the diagonal of 48 cm48 cm of the aluminum alloy plate, and the average error was 1.29 cm.