Acoustic emission technique to identify stress corrosion cracking damage

In this paper, acoustic emission (AE) and pattern recognition are utilized to identify the AE signal signatures caused by propagation of stress corrosion cracking (SCC) in a 304 stainless steel plate. The surface of the plate is under almost uniform tensile stress at a notch. A corrosive environment is provided by exposing the notch to a solution of 1% Potassium Tetrathionate by weight. The Global b-value indicated an occurrence of the first visible crack and damage stages during the SCC. Furthermore, a method based on linear regression has been developed for damage identification using AE data.