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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 use of metal strain gauges and ultrasonic transducers have long been studied in the field of Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) as a part of structural health monitoring (SHM). Strain gauges use electrical resistance to monitor strains during the loading of a component. Ultrasonic transducers are piezo devices that use a crystal-like sensing element with very low excitation energy that can monitor small strains such as acoustic emissions (AEs). These types of devices have been used to locate the sources of AEs from artificial sources, such as Hsu-Nielsen pencil lead break (PLB) tests, or natural sources such as quasi-static fracture or crack propagation. This type of evaluation has significant advantages over other types of damage inspections such as liquid die penetrant, Blue Light, Eddy Current, or X-ray inspections where visual inspections, large defects, and high levels of user experience are required. The ultrathin silicon membrane (USM) sensor developed by NanoSonic Inc. is a piezoresistive sensor, incorporating the best aspects of a conventional strain gauge and ultrasonic transducer. The sensor can measure both the strain of a component, as well as any acoustic emission that is emitted on the component. To the author's knowledge this is the only sensor capable of simultaneous measurement of these two data types. This paper presents the sensor's ability to be used for quasi-static fracture monitoring. The sensor is first compared to commercial ultrasonic transducers in an unloaded pencil lead break (PLB) test for determining the ability in measuring lamb waves for source location estimation. The NanoSonic USM sensor is further compared to commercial strain gauges and ultrasonic transducers during a PLB test under a tensile load where it is demonstrated the USM sensor yields similar measurements to both commercial sensors. The final test was a quasi-static fracture test, where the NanoSonic USM sensor was able to detect substantially lower energy AEs than the previous test and record the strain history during fracture. This duality of the USM sensor demonstrates an inherent usefulness to NDE and SHM fields. The sensor offers sensing capabilities comparable to commercially available sensors in a smaller package, with less power consumption, at a lower cost. / Master of Science / Nondestructive evaluation (NDE) is a field within structural health monitoring (SHM) that refers to determining any defects within a component that would hinder its performance without modifying its existing condition. This has historically been done by visual inspection by which experienced personnel examine the part for defects. This is inherently flawed as cracking below the surface of a component is common and would not be detected and extensive experience is required to successfully complete this task. Components in hard-to-reach places, with coatings, or that are small also prove challenges to visual inspection. Engineers have developed several new testing methods to combat these flaws. The use of acoustic emission (AE) testing allows sensors, called ultrasonic transducers, to receive and emit sounds at high frequencies to conduct the inspection. This can be done by emitting a sound which is then propagated as a wave along the surface of the component, if the wave hits a defect, it is scattered. A receiving sensor would then receive an unexpected signal, indicating that there is a problem. Furthermore, an array of these sensors can be employed to 'listen' for these surfaces waves that may be emitted during the standard operation of the components. Things like high loads, cracking, and impacts will all be able to be detected. The use of an array of sensors will allow the location of these events. This paper will discuss a new type of sensor, an ultrathin silicon membrane (USM) sensor developed by NanoSonic Inc. This type of sensor can detect high frequencies similar to an ultrasonic transducer, as well as measure large loads that would deform the part, resulting in an event known as strain. The novelty of the NanoSonic USM sensor is its ability to monitor both pieces of information simultaneously, which is believed to be the first to do so in the field. The ability to obtain information on strain and locations of acoustic events within a component during standard operation would be a valuable prospect for the aerospace, civil, and automotive industries.

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

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.

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