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<p>Electrical discharge machining (EDM) is a non-conventional machining process utilizing a series of electrical discharges to melt and vaporize workpiece material. In a wire EDM configuration wire breakage is a limiting factor in the machining productivity during the machining of workpieces with varying heights. Present methods of estimating workpiece height on-line in an effort to optimize machining parameters monitor the electrical signals for changes which may not be completely indicative of a change in workpiece height. This thesis intends to utilize acoustic emission (AE) sensors as a method for mapping the discharge location in order to estimate the workpiece height. This represents a novel approach as acoustic emission testing, while prevalent in the process monitoring of numerous conventional machining processes has yet to be significantly studied in combination with EDM.</p> <p>Another useful application of AE sensors with the EDM process under consideration is during the fast hole EDM process, where excessive wear is seen in the electrode causing true electrode length to remain uncertain. By using acoustic emission sensors to determine the true length of the electrode it could be possible to aid in the breakout detection of the electrode.</p> / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Drying is one of the most critical process steps in converting trees to a marketable material for use in high value wood products. The primary reasons for drying wood are to prevent biological deterioration and to improve mechanical strength and dimensional stability. The purpose of this research study was to develop an approach to the control of drying red oak lumber that monitors acoustic emission as the basis for setting environmental conditions throughout the drying process. Northern red oak (Quercus sp.) was chosen for this study because it is one of the more difficult woods grown in the United States to dry without inducing defects. This study was limited to end drying of short lengths of full sized red oak lumber. / Ph. D.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is the science and technology of monitoring and can assess the condition of aerospace, civil, and mechanical infrastructures using a sensing system integrated into the structure. SHM is capable of detecting, locating, and quantifying various types of damage such as cracks, holes, corrosion, delamination, and loose joints, and can be applied to various kinds of infrastructures such as buildings, railroads, windmills, bridges, and aircraft. A major technical challenge for existing SHM systems is high power consumption, which severely limits the range of its applications. In this thesis, we investigated adoption of acoustic emission detection to reduce power dissipation of SHM systems employing the impedance and the Lamb wave methods. An acoustic emission sensor of the proposed system continuously monitors acoustic events, while the SHM system is in sleep mode. The SHM system is evoked to perform the SHM operation only when there is an acoustic event detected by the acoustic emission sensor. The proposed system avoids unnecessary operation of SHM operations, which saves power, and the system is effective for certain applications such as spacecraft and wind turbine blades. We developed prototype systems using a Texas Instruments TMS320F2812 DSP evaluation board for the Lamb wave method and an MSP430 evaluation board for the impedance method. / Master of Science

The acoustic source structure, acoustic farfield, and duct terminating impedances fully describe the acoustics of a source within a duct. A main goal in the study of noise generated by turbulent combustion is to characterize the structure of the flame as an acoustic source. Data describing the farfield and duct terminating conditions allow for the testing of combustion noise models. The acoustic farfield of a premixed flame burner is documented for various power levels and air-to-fuel ratios. The terminating impedance of the burner exhaust is determined by a method using the transfer function between two microphones that communicate with the acoustic field inside the duct. High temperature probes isolate the microphones from extreme temperatures within the duct while only slightly distorting the results. The real part of the terminating impedance agrees with a correlation in the literature for hot flow leaving a duct. / M.S.

Several techniques for measuring high frequency vibrations are presented. The goal of the study is to develop a sensor for detecting acoustic emissions (AE) inside composite structures. The basics of wave propagation inside of materials has been presented along with an overview of typical acoustic emission testing. Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) were studied first and a novel, noncontact optical interferometric technique for measuring absolute amplitudes is presented. This technique has the added advantages in that it does not require that the interferometer be stabilized or phase biased. It is insensitive to laser fluctuations, random phase drifts, polarization changes and changes in mixing efficiency of the interferometer. SAW amplitudes between 7 and 2.5 angstroms were measured with the described technique. An intrinsic Fabry-Perot type interferometer was demonstrated for detecting SAW's and was then embedded into carbon fiber composite panels which were then put through tensile tests. AE's were captured, centered around 300 KHz, as is expected of a composite. These tests were repeatable and indicate that qualitative measurements of AE can be made. This sensor configuration was also used for detecting a variety of taps on the composite panel as well as pencil lead breaks, a standard calibration procedure for AE testing. / Master of Science

The safety concern of aging aircraft is a rising issue in terms of both safety and cost. An aircraft structure failure during flight is unacceptable. A method needs to be developed and standardized to test the integrity of both commercial and military aircrafts. The current method to test the structure of an aircraft requires the aircraft to be taken out of service for inspection; this is costly due to the inspection required to be performed and the lost use from downtime. A novice idea of an on-site structural health monitoring (SHM) system has been proposed to test the integrity of aircraft structure. An on-site system is a system that can be used to perform inspection on an aircraft simultaneously while the aircraft is in use. This SHM system uses the principles of active lamb wave and passive acoustic emission through the use of piezoelectric sensors as the sensing elements. Piezoelectric sensors can be used both as an input device and as a sensing element. This research focuses on the development of the major data acquisition electronic components of the system. These components are charge amplifier, high pass filter, low pass filter and line driver. A charge amplifier converts a high impedance signal to a low impedance signal. A high pass filter attenuates the low frequency content of a signal, while a low pass filter attenuates the high frequency content of a signal. A line driver converts a low current signal to a high current signal. All of these components need to operate up to a frequency of 2 MHz. Off-the-shelf electronics will be used for prototyping as custom components will not be feasible at this point of the research. / Master of Science

In this work, we first analyze the behavior of the acoustic wave from the theoretical point of view using a simplified 1-dimensional model. The model was developed based on the conservation of mass, the conservation of momentum, and the state equation; in addition, the fluid medium obeys Stokes assumption and it is homogeneous, adiabatic and isentropic. Experiment and simulation results show consistency to theoretical calculation. The second part of this thesis focuses on the PD signal analysis from an on-site PD measurement of the in-house design fiber optic sensors (by Virginia Tech, Center for Photonics Technology). Several commercial piezoelectric transducers (PZTs) were also used to compare the measurement results. The signal analysis employs the application of wavelet-based denoising technique to remove the noises, which mainly came from vibration, EMI, and light sources, embedded in the PD signal. The denoising technique includes the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) decomposition, thresh-holding of wavelet coefficients, and signal recovery by inverse discrete wavelet transform. Several approaches were compared to determine the optimal mother wavelet. The threshold limits are selected to remove the maximum Gaussian noises for each level of wavelet coefficients. The results indicate that this method could extract the PD spike from the noisy measurement effectively. The frequency of the PD pulse is also analyzed; it is shown that the frequencies lie in the range of 70 kHz to 250 kHz. In addition, with the assumed acoustic wave propagation delay between PD source and sensors, it was found that all PD activities occur in the first and third quadrant in reference to the applied sinusoidal transformer voltage. / Master of Science

Research effort was directed towards developing a near real-time, acousto-ultrasonic (AU), nondestructive evaluation (NDE) tool to study the failure mechanisms of ceramic composites. Progression of damage is monitored in real-time by observing the changes in the received AU signal during the actual test. During the real-time AU test, the AU signals are generated and received by the AU transducers attached to the specimen while it is being subjected to increasing quasi-static loads or cyclic loads (10 Hz, R = 0.1). The received AU signals for 64 successive pulses were gated in the time domain (T = 40.96 µsec) and then averaged every second over ten load cycles and stored in a computer file during fatigue tests. These averaged gated signals are representative of the damage state of the specimen at that point of its fatigue life. This is also the first major attempt in the development and application of real-time AU for continuously monitoring damage accumulation during fatigue without interrupting the test. The present work has verified the capability of the AU technique to assess the damage state in silicon carbide/calcium aluminosilicate (SiC/CAS) and silicon carbide/magnesium aluminosilicate (SiC/MAS) ceramic composites. Continuous monitoring of damage initiation and progression under quasi-static ramp loading in tension to failure of unidirectional and cross-ply SiC/CAS and quasi-isotropic SiC/MAS ceramic composite specimens at room temperature was accomplished using near real-time AU parameters. The AU technique was shown to be able to detect the stress levels for the onset and saturation of matrix cracks, respectively. The critical cracking stress level is used as a design stress for brittle matrix composites operating at elevated temperatures. The AU technique has found that the critical cracking stress level is 10-15 % below the level presently obtained for design purposes from analytical models. An acousto-ultrasonic stress-strain response (AUSSR) model for unidirectional and cross-ply ceramic composites was formulated. The AUSSR model predicts the strain response to increasing stress levels using real-time AU data and classical laminated plate theory. The Weibull parameters of the AUSSR model are used to calculate the design stress for thermo-structural applications. Real-time AU together with the AUSSR model was used to study the failure mechanisms of SiC/CAS ceramic composites under static and fatigue loading. An S-N curve was generated for a cross-ply SiC/CAS ceramic composite material. The AU results are corroborated and complemented by other NDE techniques, namely, in-situ optical microscope video recordings and edge replication. / Ph. D.

Un suivi des processus microstructuraux prenant place au cours de la fatigue oligocyclique de l’aluminium pur est assuré par la technique d’émission acoustique EA par ces deux types: émission continue et discrète. Cette technique est intéressante car elle permet de suivre l’évolution dynamique de la structure tout le long de l’essai. Les différents stades du comportement macroscopique du matériau au cours des sollicitations cycliques sont clairement différenciés par l’activité acoustique. Nous distinguons cinq stades : écrouissage primaire, adoucissement primaire, écrouissage secondaire, adoucissement secondaire et rupture. Les trois premiers stades mettent en jeu des phénomènes microstructuraux liés à la plasticité du matériau tandis que des phénomènes relatifs à l’endommagement (micro et macro-fissuration) dominent les derniers stades. L’EA continue résulte de l’effet cumulatif de nombreux mouvements de dislocations de faible amplitude et décorrélés entre eux. Cette plasticité continue diminue au cours du 1er stade mais copie l’évolution de la réponse macroscopique de l’échantillon au cours des stades suivants. Ce comportement est lié aux structures de dislocations établies à travers les différents stades de fatigue. En revanche, l’EA de type discret enregistrée lors des trois premiers stades est associée à un autre type de plasticité : la plasticité intermittente, se manifestant à travers des mouvements coopératifs de grande ampleur, les avalanches de dislocations. Ces avalanches de dislocations génèrent des signaux acoustiques de tailles variables, distribuées en loi de puissance. La plasticité intermittente est alors invariante d’échelle tandis que la plasticité continue met en jeu des mouvements ayant une taille caractéristique. Nous mettons ainsi en évidence pour la première fois la coexistence de ces deux types de plasticité dans un matériau cubique à faces centrées CFC, qui ne sont donc pas incompatibles. Au cours des deux derniers stades de fatigue, les signaux acoustiques enregistrés se catégorisent également en deux groupes: l’un est caractérisé par des invariances d’échelle, l’autre associé à une taille caractéristique. La première catégorie comprend des signaux acoustiques indépendants, apparaissant aléatoirement au cours des cycles. Ces signaux sont générés par des phénomènes de microfissuration au sein du volume de l’échantillon (nucléation, percolation…). Le second groupe, réunit des signaux acoustiques générés quasiment au même niveau de contrainte sur plusieurs cycles successifs et ayant une signature acoustique quasi identique. Nous nommons ces signaux multiplets en référence à la sismologie. Nous émettons l'hypothèse que de tels multiplets d’EA sont la signature de la propagation, cycle après cycle, d'une fissure de fatigue dont la trace peut être vu post-mortem avec les stries de fatigue sur une surface de fracture, ou encore la signature de frottements entre les aspérités présentes de part et d’autre des lèvres de fissures. / An analysis of microstructural processes taking place during low-cycle fatigue of pure aluminum is performed by the Acoustic Emission technique (AE) with its two types: continuous and discrete. The main interest of this technique is that it enables the following of the dynamic evolution of the microstructure during the fatigue test. We distinguished five fatigue stages: primary hardening, primary softening, secondary hardening, secondary softening and failure. The various stages of the material’s macroscopic behavior during cyclic loading are clearly differentiated by the acoustic activity. During the first three stages, mainly microstructural phenomena related to plasticity of material are taking place, whereas damage (micro and macro-cracking) dominate the last two stages. The continuous AE results from the cumulative effect of many uncorrelated dislocations’ movements of low amplitude. This continuous plasticity decreases during the 1st stage but reproduces the evolution of the macroscopic behavior of the sample during following stages. This behavior is related to the dislocation structure established during the various fatigue stages. On the other hand, the discrete AE recorded at the time of the first three stages is associated to another type of plasticity: intermittent plasticity. This plasticity is associated to co-operative dislocation movements of great amplitude; dislocation avalanches. These dislocation avalanches generate acoustic signals power law distributed in amplitude and energies. Intermittent plasticity is then scale invariant while continuous plasticity is associated to dislocation movements with a characteristic size. We highlight for the first time the coexistence of these two types of plasticity in FCC materials, which are therefore not incompatible. During the last two stages of fatigue, the recorded acoustic signals are categorized in two groups: the first one is characterized by scale invariance whereas the other is associated to a characteristic size. The first category comprises independent acoustic signals, appearing randomly during cycles. These signals are generated by micro-cracking events within the volume of the sample (nucleation, percolation…). The second group contains acoustic signals generated almost at the same stress level during several successive cycles and having a nearly identical acoustic signature. We name these signals multiplets in reference to seismology. We put forth the hypothesis that such AE multiplets are the signature of fatigue crack propagation, one cycle after the other, whose trace can be observed post-mortem with fatigue striations on fracture surface, or a signature of frictions between the asperities present on both sides of the crack.