The situation of acoustic emission in Germany

This presentation summarizes the situation of acoustic emission (AE) testing in Germany in research, development and industrial application. First a short overview on AE history in Germany is given. The AE activities in the field of testing of pressurized nuclear power components in the seventies and eighties are descibed. These activites dealt with creation of reliable base knowledge on AE, development of an optimized measuring technique and determiation of the physical limitations of the method. It has been shown that the probability of detecting macroscopic nongrowing flaws cannot be quantified during hydrotest. The may be one of the reasons that there was no breakthrough in industrial application. The other main reasons are the lack of reproducibility of flaw detection and the lack of defect size determination. Growing flaws can be surveilled with local instrumentation with high sensitivity even under in-service conditions. However, this potential of AE testing is presently not use d in the field of nuclear power technique. AE testing has gained some acceptance in the domain of chemical industry for requalification tests of out-dated tanks, vessels and pipes. Recently there are some efforts to apply AE testing during gas pressure tests of vessels mainly as an additional measure to protect the personnel. Some potential and promising future applications can be found in the field of monitoring of tool wear and breakage