Some aspects of AE application in tool condition monitoring

Acoustic emission (AE) is rather a well-known form of non-destructive testing. In the last few years the technology of the AE measurement has been expanded to cover the area of tool condition monitoring. The paper presents some experience of Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) in such applications of AE. It provides an interpretation of common AE signal distortions and possible solutions to avoid them. Furthermore, a characteristic study of several different AE and ultrasonic sensors being used in WUT is furnished. Evaluation of the applicability of some basic measures of acoustic emission for tool condition monitoring is also presented in the paper. Finally paper presents a method of the catastrophic tool failure detection in turning, which uses symptoms other than the direct magnitude AERMS signal. The method is based on the statistical analysis of the distributions of the AERMS signal.