Theoretical and experimental analysis of acoustic emission signal for resonant sensor on homogenous material

The modelling of AE signal has been conducted for AE resonant sensor. For surface loading, the generation of acoustic emission (AE) signal has been developed and simulated in this paper for two homogenous materials. The simulated results have been verified by executing AE model experiments under similar considerations. Aluminum and steel have been selected as the wave propagation media for both modelling and experiment. A sine load at source point has been implemented by a function generator. A piezoelectric AE resonant sensor has been utilized to collect the vertical response due to the vertical load on the material surface. It converts the dynamic displacement of the AE wave into electrical signal. As the transfer function of the sensor, the sensor sensitivity characteristics of the AE sensor (R15 alpha) has been calculated and incorporated in the model. The acoustic impedance of the metal surface and sensor has been utilized to determine the transfer loss due to the signal travelling from the sensor to the material. For both the experimental and simulated AE waves, the rise time and the maximum amplitude have been evaluated and the signal parametric characterizations have been performed. The attenuation property of maximum amplitude and the increase of rise time with the increment of source to receiver distance has been determined for the verification of the proposed model.