Acoustic emission non-destructive testing of structures using source location techniques.

The technology of acoustic emission (AE) testing has been advanced and used at Sandia for the past 40 years. AE has been used on structures including pressure vessels, fire bottles, wind turbines, gas wells, nuclear weapons, and solar collectors. This monograph begins with background topics in acoustics and instrumentation and then focuses on current acoustic emission technology. It covers the overall design and system setups for a test, with a wind turbine blade as the object. Test analysis is discussed with an emphasis on source location. Three test examples are presented, two on experimental wind turbine blades and one on aircraft fire extinguisher bottles. Finally, the code for a FORTRAN source location program is given as an example of a working analysis program. Throughout the document, the stress is on actual testing of real structures, not on laboratory experiments

NDE: An effective approach to improved reliability and safety. A technology survey

Technical abstracts are presented for about 100 significant documents relating to nondestructive testing of aircraft structures or related structural testing and the reliability of the more commonly used evaluation methods. Particular attention is directed toward acoustic emission; liquid penetrant; magnetic particle; ultrasonics; eddy current; and radiography. The introduction of the report includes an overview of the state-of-the-art represented in the documents that have been abstracted

Acoustic emission analysis as a non-destructive test procedure for fiber compound structures

The concept of acoustic emission analysis is explained in scientific terms. The detection of acoustic events, their localization, damage discrimination, and event summation curves are discussed. A block diagram of the concept of damage-free testing of fiber-reinforced synthetic materials is depicted. Prospects for application of the concept are assessed

Characterisation of Al corrosion and its impact on the mechanical performance of composite cement wasteforms by the acoustic emission technique

In this study acoustic emission (AE) non-destructive method was used to evaluate the mechanical performance of cementitious wasteforms with encapsulated Al waste. AE waves generated as a result of Al corrosion in small-size blast furnace slag/ordinary Portland cement wasteforms were recorded and analysed. The basic principles of the conventional parameter-based AE approach and signal-based analysis were combined to establish a relationship between recorded AE signals and different interactions between the Al and the encapsulating cement matrix. The AE technique was shown as a potential and valuable tool for a new area of application related to monitoring and inspection of the mechanical stability of cementitious wasteforms with encapsulated metallic wastes such as Al

Damage quantification techniques in acoustic emission monitoring

Acoustic emission (AE) analysis is one of the several diagnostic techniques available nowadays for structural health monitoring (SHM) of engineering structures. Some of its advantages over other techniques include high sensitivity to crack growth and capability of monitoring a structure in real time. The phenomenon of rapid release of energy within a material by crack initiation or growth in form of stress waves is known as acoustic emission (AE). In AE technique, these stress waves are recorded by means of suitable sensors placed on the surface of a structure. Recorded signals are subsequently analysed to gather information about the nature of the source. By enabling early detection of crack growth, AE technique helps in planning timely retrofitting or other maintenance jobs or even replacement of the structure if required. In spite of being a promising tool, some challenges do still exist behind the successful application of AE technique. Large amount of data is generated during AE testing, hence effective data analysis is necessary, especially for long term monitoring uses. Appropriate analysis of AE data for quantification of damage level is an area that has received considerable attention. Various approaches available for damage quantification for severity assessment are discussed in this paper, with special focus on civil infrastructure such as bridges. One method called improved b-value analysis is used to analyse data collected from laboratory testing

Review: Acoustic emission technique - Opportunities, challenges and current work at QUT

Acoustic emission (AE) is the phenomenon where high frequency stress waves are generated by rapid release of energy within a material by sources such as crack initiation or growth. AE technique involves recording these stress waves by means of sensors placed on the surface and subsequent analysis of the recorded signals to gather information such as the nature and location of the source. AE is one of the several non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques currently used for structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil, mechanical and aerospace structures. Some of its advantages include ability to provide continuous in-situ monitoring and high sensitivity to crack activity. Despite these advantages, several challenges still exist in successful application of AE monitoring. Accurate localization of AE sources, discrimination between genuine AE sources and spurious noise sources and damage quantification for severity assessment are some of the important issues in AE testing and will be discussed in this paper. Various data analysis and processing approaches will be applied to manage those issues

Modal analysis of high frequency acoustic signal approach for progressive failure monitoring in thin composite plates

During the past few decades, many successful research works have evidently shown remarkable capability of Acoustic Emission (AE) for early damage detection of composite materials. Modal Analysis of AE signals or Modal Acoustic Emission (MAE) offers a better theoretical background for acoustic emission analysis which is necessary to get more qualitative and quantitative result. In this paper, the application of MAE concept in a single channel AE source location detection method for failure characterization and monitoring in thin composite plates was presented. Single channel AE source location is one of the recent studies for composite early damage localization, owing to the growing interest and knowledge of modal analysis of AE wave. A tensile test was conducted for glass fiber epoxy resin specimen with small notch. A single channel of AE system was used to determine the AE source location on specimen under testing. The results revealed that AE single channel source location provides reasonable accuracy for glass fiber laminate which was tested

Structural Health Monitoring of Large Structures Using Acoustic Emission-Case Histories

Acoustic emission (AE) techniques have successfully been used for assuring the structural integrity of large rocket motorcases since 1963 [...