A Wire-Guided Transducer for Acoustic Emission Sensing

A novel transducer for active or passive sensing has been developed and tested experimentally. It features a steel wire acting as a wave guide between a piezoceramic element and the structure under test. Some advantages of the wireguided transducer include its applicability to structures operating at high temperature, which otherwise preclude the surface mounting of piezoceramics, its small contact area to the structure, which enables several such transducers to be deployed in an arc around a known crack location as an acoustic emission sensor array, and its low cost and ease of installation. Another potential advantage is simplified signal processing for source localization, which is developed in this paper and evaluated experimentally.