Elsevier

Wear

Volume 137, Issue 1, April 1990, Pages 63-90
Wear

Characterization of particle impact by quantitative acoustic emission

https://doi.org/10.1016/0043-1648(90)90018-6Get rights and content

Abstract

Acoustic emission (AE) is proposed as a method of monitoring hard particle impact on surfaces. In a preliminary study, small spherical particles of nominal diameter 53–63 μm and 75–90 μm of bronze and glass respectively were dropped in vacuum onto steel or aluminium target plates at selected velocities between 2.5 and 7.1 m s−1. At these low velocities the collisions are entirely elastic and no erosion occurs. However, a quantitative AE signal analysis method was developed which enabled various parameters from the particle impacts to be determined, with the potential for measuring the degree of plasticity of impact in later experiments.

AE signals were detected with a calibrated broad bandwidth piezo-electric transducer positioned on the opposite face of the target plate at the impact epicentre. The Green's function for the plate, together with the AE transducer and system response obtained by calibration using a capacitance transducer, were deconvolved from AE signals to yield the impact force function of the particle impact. The velocity dependence of the impact time and peak impact force thus determined agreed with that predicted from semi-empirical models of elastic particle impact. The absolute magnitude of these two parameters also compared very well with theoretical values. The quantitative acoustic technique developed was capable of sizing the particles, and the results compared favourably with the particle size distribution measured optically, giving the correct mean particle diameter to within 10% and the distribution spread to within 26%. This fundamental approach provides a framework for later extension to plastic and partially plastic particle impact Thus the technique could be developed for on-line erosion monitoring.

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    The particle size, however, shows little effect on power draw. The model involves several assumptions: an impact is regarded as an instant event; the impact energy only affects vibration amplitude but not frequency and phase (Buttle and Scruby, 1990; Hu et al., 2014) small impact angles have little effects on AE signals (Buttle and Scruby, 1990); and friction has no effect on AE signals. Fig. 5a shows the measured sound signal.

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    Therefore, whereas it is a relatively simple matter to establish a correlation between AE and cumulative impact energy in the laboratory, there is a significant calibration problem when it comes to practical application. One of the seminal studies of hard particle impact on surfaces using acoustic emission was by Buttle and Scruby [6] in which individual glass and bronze particles were dropped freely in a vacuum onto a specimen on whose opposite face an AE sensor was mounted. They concluded that, AE can be used to distinguish particle size provided that the time between individual impacts is at least 1 ms. Using a different approach, Boschetto and Quadrini [10] have dropped a predefined weight of powder samples onto a metal plate whilst recording the AE.

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