Development of Smart Stress Memory Sensor Using AE Kaiser Effect

Reliability of structures is an important task to ensure the ease and safety of our life, and further development of non-destructive evaluation for structures such as bridges and tunnels is required. Some fatigue sensors that consist of sacrificed specimen have been developed to evaluate the fatigue damage of structures such as fatigue cyclic number and residual lifetime. However, these fatigue sensors can be used only when the applied stress amplitude is known. We tried to develop a new smart stress memory patch that measured both maximum stress and number of fatigue cycles simultaneously using Kaiser effect of Acoustic Emission (AE) and crack length. In this study, the characteristics of the smart patch was evaluated. Pure copper was used for this sensor because its good corrosion resistance, stable crack propagation and detectability of AE near yield point. Fatigue test was performed under the constant stress amplitude to evaluate the crack propagation behavior using the relationship between stress intensity factor and crack propagation rate. The obtained curve between crack length and number of fatigue cycles by these crack propagation behavior was in good agreement with experimental results. AE measurement after some fatigue tests was performed and AE was detected at the applied fatigue stress. These results demonstrated that number of fatigue cycles and the maximum stress could be measured by this fatigue sensor.