Fatigue crack growth monitoring of idealized gearbox spline component using acoustic emission

The spline component of gearbox structure is a non-redundant element that requires early detection of flaws for preventing catastrophic failures. The acoustic emission (AE) method is a direct way of detecting active flaws; however, the method suffers from the influence of background noise and location/sensor based pattern recognition method. It is important to identify the source mechanism and adapt it to different test conditions and sensors. In this paper, the fatigue crack growth of a notched and flattened gearbox spline component is monitored using the AE method in a laboratory environment. The test sample has the major details of the spline component on a flattened geometry. The AE data is continuously collected together with strain gauges strategically positions on the structure. The fatigue test characteristics are 4 Hz frequency and 0.1 as the ratio of minimum to maximum loading in tensile regime. It is observed that there are significant amount of continuous emissions released from the notch tip due to the formation of plastic deformation and slow crack growth. The frequency spectra of continuous emissions and burst emissions are compared to understand the difference of sudden crack growth and gradual crack growth. The predicted crack growth rate is compared with the AE data using the cumulative AE events at the notch tip. The source mechanism of sudden crack growth is obtained solving the inverse mathematical problem from output signal to input signal. The spline component of gearbox structure is a non-redundant element that requires early detection of flaws for preventing catastrophic failures. In this paper, the fatigue crack growth of a notched and flattened gearbox spline component is monitored using the AE method The AE data is continuously collected together with strain gauges. There are significant amount of continuous emissions released from the notch tip due to the formation of plastic deformation and slow crack growth. The source mechanism of sudden crack growth is obtained solving the inverse mathematical problem from output signal to input signal.