Characterizing Acoustic Sources in Pressure Vessels

The "dream" of acoustic emission (AE) testing is to get the acoustic source characteristics from AE signals, especially when evaluating aging pressure vessels. In this paper, the wavelet transform was used to analyze different AE signals from cracks (surface and inner), pencil-lead-breakage and leakage. These acoustic sources were applied on an actual pressure vessel. While the vessel experienced hydraulic pressure, their AE signals were acquired by a digital AE testing system with a wide frequency band transducer and a high speed A/D converter. Then, the digital signals were analyzed using the wavelet transform method. Correlation coefficients of the transformed data show that the different acoustic sources can be easily identified.