THE FUNDAMENTALS OF STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING BY THE ACOUSTIC EMISSION METHOD

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is an emerging field of modern engineering that deals with diagnosis and monitoring of structures during their operation. Increasing requirements for safety, development of tools and criteria for condition based maintenance (CBM), cost reduction are all driving development of SHM methods in different industries. The primary goal of SHM is detection, identification, assessment and monitoring of flaws or faults/conditions that affect or may affect in a future safety or performance of structures. SHM combines elements of non-destructive testing and evaluation, condition/process monitoring, statistical pattern recognition and physical modeling. Acoustic emission method uniquely fits to the concept of SHM due to its capabilities to examine, monitor structures and assess structural integrity during their normal operation. In this work, the fundamental definitions and principles of application of Acoustic Emission as a method of SHM are elaborated. This includes:  Recommended terminology and definitions of SHM by the AE method.  Outline of recommended process of AE SHM.  Fundamental assumptions and principals regarding development of new SHM procedures, selection of equipment and methods of data acquisition and analysis, diagnosis, monitoring and prediction by AE SHM. The developed principals provide an outline for systematic and standard development of new SHM applications based on Acoustic Emission method.