An initial acousto-ultrasonic experimental investigation of defects in composite specimens used in the transportation domain

Abstract

Recently, the transport industry has been substituting metal with composite parts due to their properties, such as increased strength, stiffness and lightweightness. Inspection and monitoring are very important tools that detect, identify and measure occurred damage or deterioration state of transport means and infrastructure. Acousto-ultrasonics is an non-destructive testing technique, which is essentially a combination of acoustic emission methodology with ultrasonic simulation of stress waves to assess defect states in certain materials. In this paper, we perform initial experiments with composite specimens, attempting to detect defects. In particular, the attenuation of simulated acoustic emission events are measured in order to further investigate the phenomenon of edge reflections from small composite specimens. Furthermore, the detection of two different types of defects is shown using only two features extracted from the signal.

Application of Forward Error Correction (FEC) Codes in Wireless Acoustic Emission Structural Health Monitoring on Railway Infrastructures

“…An excellent method for performing SHM is acoustic emission (AE), among others [7]. Acousto-ultrasonics also utilise AE; however, this method constitutes an inspection method [8,9]. There are a number of applications of AE monitoring in different infrastructure [10].…”