ACOUSTIC-EMISSION OF THERMALLY CYCLED REFRACTORIES

Acoustic emission (AE) technique was applied to continuously monitor property degradation during standard thermal shock fatique testing of three distinct types of refractories. AE results were correlated with respective strength losses of analyzed materials after a defined number of heating and cooling cycles. The complex nature of the AE signals was revealed by AE amplitude and duration analysis indicating that not all of the signals that were registered during thermal shock tests could be correlated with strength changes. On this basis, it was postulated that simple counting of a number of AE events should not be used as a measure of the degree of damage in refractories under thermal shock. Copyright © 1990, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved