No new acoustic signals have been detected in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Hopes of recovering the aircraft’s black box rose significantly in the past week after Australian vessel Ocean Shield detected four signals believed to have come from MH370’s all-important flight recorder.

However, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) said this morning that no new signals had been detected in the past 24 hours.

Nine military aircraft, one civil aircraft and 14 ships will continue the hunt for MH370, visually searching an area measuring 41,393 square kilometres about 2300km north-west of Perth, the JACC said.

The size of the search area again appears to contradict Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s recent suggestion that the search area in the Indian Ocean had narrowed.

Mr Abbott is in China on a trade mission and his host nation is eager for good news regarding MH370, with 153 of its citizens on board the ill-fated flight, which has been missing since March 8.

“We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometres,” Mr Abbott told business leaders in Shanghai on Friday.