On the Bump Tests of Cracked Shafts Using Acoustic Emission Techniques

Abstract

An investigation about the application of Acoustic Emission (AE) techniques to analyze the dynamic response of different cracked shafts rendered in bump tests is presented in this work. The experimental apparatus devised for this work complies of six shafts with different transverse crack sizes and a high-frequency data acquistion system. The AE signals generated in the bump tests performed on the different cracked shafts are captured by a wideband AE transducer. Those signals are treated by using statistical moments, wavelet transforms, and frequency- and time-domain procedures. A transverse crack of predetermined depth is etched into each shaft. The experimental results show that the values of kurtosis and skewness estimated for the AE signals can be used to identify the crack size.