A methodology to estimate the adhesive bonding defects and the final releasing moments in conical joints based on the acoustic emissions technique

It is widely demonstrated in literature that the presence and the density of adhesive bonding defects are difficult to estimate with conventional non-destructive testing techniques once the parts are assembled together. For this reason it is very important to set up a new methodology capable of estimating the adhesive bonding defect and the final releasing moment of the assembled joints. The purpose of this paper is to verify the performance of the acoustic emissions technique when applied, as a non destructive one, in this field. Our investigation aimed to highlight the good correlation between the density of the adhesive defect (low, medium and high) and the cumulative counts of the acoustic emissions and to verify the accuracy of the estimated final releasing moment of the coupling. (C) 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.