Advances in Wear Measurement by Acoustic Emission Analysis Compared to Radionuclide Technique

Online analysis of a tribological contact without changing the conditions of the system is a challenging exercise until today. Yet, it is not possible to detect wear and the particle size ith one method. Numerous works study different phenomena of the behavior of ultrasonic structure-borne noise in dry friction contacts. However all these experiments are limited to basic pin-disc experiments without any concrete reference to an application. A new application for detecting real contact-geometry, wear and particle size with one in-situ condition monitoring method on a test rigs is presented in this paper. The method of structure-born noise analysis has proven to be suitable for detecting the occurrence of solid friction [1]–[4]. By using a broadband piezoelectric acoustic emission sensor to detect ultrasonic structure-born noise, caused by metal-to-metal contact it is now possible to study different types of phenomena during their time of appearance. The Radionuclide Technology (RNT) was used the first time at dry running friction systems. With the RNT it is possible to correlate ultrasonic structure-borne noise with wear volume in dry running friction systems. The application is used for deeper understanding of the friction behavior and wear phenomena in dry running contacts.