Enhanced Fatigue Crack Detection in Aging Aircraft Using Continuous Acoustic Emission Monitoring

During the past 20 years acoustic emission has been applied successfully to numerous materials degradation and failure problems. These applications are catalogued in Drouillard’s bibliography of acoustic emission [1,2]. There have also been many disappointing results due to inadequate care and technique for discriminating between signals resulting from the materials degradation (or failure process of interest) and those resulting from environmental noise