Abstract
High efficiency and good section quality are two main objectives of metal bar cropping. A suitable control method can help to achieve both goals. An investigation of the control method of low-cycle fatigue cropping (LCFC) based on the acoustic emission (AE) technique has been proposed in this study. Ring-down counts and kurtosis are used to monitor the whole process of LCFC. The results showed that kurtosis is more suitable for monitoring the LCFC process and as a critical parameter to optimize the control method than ring-down counts in the noisy factory environment.Moreover, three types of materials are studied in this experiment; by combine with the AE results, macroscopic images and microscopic images of sections, characteristics of various LCFC stages are obtained. The results also indicated reduce the area of the transient fracture zone is the key to improve the section quality. Reducing the load frequency before the unstable crack propagation stage will beneficial to realize the goals. Based on the evaluation of kurtosis, an optimized control method is presented, and two control parameters: transient time T and the critical value of the slope of kurtosis C are determined. For 16Mn, 1045 and Al 6061, the T is 5s, 10s, and 1s, respectively. For 16Mn, 1045, and Al 6061, the C is 100, 300, and 0, respectively. Two parameters, h and S, are used to evaluate the section quality and four control strategies are compared. The results indicate the optimal control methods can improve the section quality effectively. The influence trend of reducing loading frequency is investigated by further comparison. It can be seen as the frequency decreases, the efficiency of the section quality improving decreases. In order to realize the optimal results, different control strategies are adopted for different materials. Strategy 1 (high frequency is 20Hz，high frequency thought the whole process), strategy 2 (high frequency is 20Hz，low frequency is 8.33Hz), and strategy 3 (high frequency is 20Hz，low frequency is 6.67Hz) is suitable for Al 6061, 1045, and 16Mn, respectively.
