Identification of Deformation Stage and Crack Initiation in TC11 Alloys Using Acoustic Emission

Abstract

The Acoustic Emission (AE) is a widely used real-time monitoring technique for the deformation damage and crack initiation of areo-engine blades. In this work, a tensile test for TC11 titanium alloy, one of the main materials of aero-engine, was performed. The AE signals from different stages of this test were collected. Then, the AE signals were decomposed by the Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) method, in which the signals were divided into two different frequency bands. We calculated the engery ratio by dividing the two different frequency bands to characterize TC11′s degree of deformation. The results showed that when the energy ratio was −0.5 dB, four stages of deformation damage of the TC11 titanium alloy could be clearly identified. We further combined the calculated Partial Energy Ratio (PER) and Weighted Peak Frequency (WPF) to identify the crack initiation of the TC11 titanium alloy. The results showed that the identification accuracy was 96.33%.