Development of Acoustic Emission Methods for In-Flight Monitoring of Aircraft Structures
Date
Authors
Major Professor
Advisor
Committee Member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Authors
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Is Version Of
Versions
Series
Begun in 1973, the Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE) is the premier international NDE meeting designed to provide an interface between research and early engineering through the presentation of current ideas and results focused on facilitating a rapid transfer to engineering development.
This site provides free, public access to papers presented at the annual QNDE conference between 1983 and 1999, and abstracts for papers presented at the conference since 2001.
Department
Abstract
This paper provides an overview of an ongoing program to utilize acoustic emission methods to detect fatigue crack growth in aircraft structure during operation. Experimental methods including instrumentation, test specimens, newly-developed sensors, and experimental procedures used in acquiring acoustic emission waveforms are described. Fretting noises are produced at the interfaces between 7075 aluminum plates and a steel bolt during fatigue cycling of three-part joint specimens. A two-channel waveform recorder and analyzer records the experimental data for subsequent pattern recognition analysis. The observed signals cluster into three distinct groups on the sinusoidal load curve. By varying experimental procedures, these groups of signals can be associated with crack growth, fretting, and crack opening.
Another apsect of the project is the development and evaluation of two new sensor designs having improved bandwidths. Calibration information and performance of these sensors in fatigue test monitoring are discussed. It is possible to obtain well-defined data sets from joint specimens that can be used in pattern recognition analysis. The results of such analysis is given in a companion paper. The future direction of this project in leading to in-flight AE monitoring of aircraft is also presented.