Comparative study of active and passive sensing with AE and PWAS transducers

Monitoring of fatigue cracking in bridges using a combined passive and active scheme has been approached by the authors. Passive Acoustic Emission (AE) monitoring has shown to be able to detect crack growth behavior by picking up the stress waves resulting from the breathing of cracks while active ultrasonic pulsing can quantitatively assess structural integrity by sensing out an interrogating pulse and receive the structural reflections from the discontinuity. In this paper, we present a comparative study of active and passive sensing with two types of transducers: (a) AE transducers, and (b) embeddable piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS). The study was performed experimentally on steel plates. Both pristine and damaged (notched) conditions were considered. For active sensing, pitchcatch configuration was examined in which one transducer was the transmitter and another transducer acted as the receiver. The ping signal was generated by the AE hardware/software package AEwin. For passive sensing, 0.5-mm lead breaks were executed both on top and on the edge of the plate. The comparative nature of the study was achieved by having the AE and PWAS transducers placed on the same location but on the opposite sides of the plate. The paper presents the main findings of this study in terms of (a) signal strength; (b) signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio; (c) waveform clarity; (d) waveform Fourier spectrum contents and bandwidth; (e) capability to detect and localize AE source; (f) capability to detect and localize damage. The paper performs a critical discussion of the two sensing methodologies, conventional AE transducers vs. PWAS transducers.