Study of the Tensile Damage of High-Strength Aluminum Alloy by Acoustic Emission

The key material of high-speed train gearbox shells is high-strength aluminum alloy. Material damage is inevitable in the process of servicing. It is of great importance to study material damage for in-service gearboxes of high-speed train. Structural health monitoring methods have been widely used to study material damage in recent years. This study focuses on the application of an acoustic emission (AE) method to quantify tensile damage evolution of high-strength aluminum alloy. First, a characteristic parameter was developed to connect AE signals with tensile damage. Second, a tensile damage quantification model was presented based on the relationship between AE counts and tensile behavior to study elastic deformation of tensile damage. Then tensile tests with AE monitoring were employed to collect AE signals and tensile damage data of nine samples. The experimental data were used to quantify tensile damage of high-strength aluminum alloy A356 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2015 by the authors.