Acoustic emission monitoring re-enters the stage
An
AV Technology product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Sep 24, 2008
The scientific application of acoustic emission (AE) technology first emerged in the 1950s, but appeared to fall out of fashion from the late 1970s onwards.
With the increased focus on cost-effective ways of optimising machine and equipment reliability and availability, AE is now experiencing an important renaissance as a valuable condition-based monitoring (CBM) and predictive maintenance tool.
AV Technology, which designs and manufactures its own range of AE sensors and instrumentation, is pioneering new ways of applying this technology across a wide range of industries and applications.
Modern acoustic emission technology is a very versatile, non-invasive way to gather information about a material or structure and was originally developed as a means of non-destructive testing and quality control.
Examples in these areas include detecting and locating faults in pressure vessels, damage assessment in fibre-reinforced polymer-matrix composites, monitoring welding applications and corrosion processes, various process-monitoring applications and long-term monitoring of civil-engineering structures such as bridges, pipelines and offshore platforms.
More bizarre applications include the detection of vine weevils in nurseries.
The past five years have seen an increase in the use of AE as a powerful and flexible condition monitoring cum predictive maintenance tool, especially when used in conjunction with other recognised CBM disciplines such as lubrication management, vibration analysis and thermography.
Applications can be as diverse as providing early-warning systems for misalignments in bucket elevator drive mechanisms to predicting failure modes of bearings in rotary filling machines, anode formers or offshore cranes.
AE technology can be used for short-term one-off monitoring projects, longer-term monitoring or permanent installations typically involving some form of warning system ahead of failure.
The cost of plant downtime for unscheduled repairs or maintenance can be significant, running into thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds per hour.
Unnecessary additional costs are also incurred if a 'belt-and-braces' approach is adopted whereby critical components such as bearings are replaced ahead of time.
The use of AE technology for CBM is a qualitative rather than a quantitative technique.
For example, it can be used very effectively to monitor and trend the condition of bearings in large rotating or reciprocating equipment and be set up to give early warning of impending failure.
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