Abstract: A method of corrosion evaluation on tank bottom based on adaptive affinity propagation (adAP) algorithm is proposed for finding acoustic emission (AE) events clustering regions.The number of clusters is searched for finding the optional clustering solution by adaptive scanning of parameters space and adaptively adjusting damping factors.In addition,the AE events focusing areas are determined by the clustering results and the level of tank bottom's corrosion state is evaluated according to the acoustic emission testing standards.The test results of storage tanks show that the limitation of the traditional K-means algorithm which does not know the clusters number is overcome by the method and the clustering regions of AE events are accurately found.Thus the accuracy of corrosion evaluation on storage tank bottom is improved.