Acoustic Emission Monitoring for Structural Time-Related Assessment

A lightweight power-efficient Acoustic Emission (AE) based monitoring system capable of surveying the structural health of space modules during their critical phases is now concretely feasible. The current state of a complex structure, such as the ISS, and its vicinity to a critical point is dependant on its entire history; an effective assessment of this can be had through the characterization of the AE activity by its statistical properties as they are correlated to the type of crack-growth processes underway and the size of the cracks involved. Advances made in this field in many different application (e.g. nuclear pressure vessel assessment, railway wheel testing, pipe and valve monitoring, to mention but a few), have lead to improved techniques which are now successfully applied to more acoustically complex structures.