Evaluation of the acoustic emission monitoring method for stress corrosion cracking on aboveground storage tank floor steel

Stress corrosion cracking (SCC), which is one of the main threats to the structural integrity of aboveground storage tanks (ASTs), has recently attracted much attention. In this paper, the SCC of the storage tank floor was studied by the acoustic emission (AE) and electrochemical methods. Throughout the whole SCC process, the AE signal characteristic parameters, cumulating features, and correlations were analyzed, and the signal timefrequency local features were extracted via wavelet packet analysis based on the MATLAB program. A good correlation of the instantaneous variations between the AE activity and the corrosion behavior was found. Microcrack creeping and macrocrack propagation were the most important AE sources in SCC; these sources can be recognized by the AE parameters and the AE frequency spectrum. The results in this paper will be beneficial for the diagnosis of corrosion severity and the recognition of the corrosion sources by AE online inspection and will further provide an assessment of the AST integrity by means of a risk-based inspection technique.