Failure Diagnosing in Vehicles Using Acoustic Emission

Abstract

Aims: Two diagnosing faults of the vehicle’s parts, an old and modern method, mechanical or electronic methods, before or after faulty occurring, One of methods which can be used before faulty occurring is Acoustic Emission (AE) for parts producing sound, this give an indication of the status of the part, and an expectation if the part is in good condition, needs repairing or replacing. Study Design: Mention the design of the study here. Place and Duration of Study: Department of Mechanical Engineering / Faculty of Engineering Technology Al-Balqa Applied University, P.O.Box (15008), North Marka, 11134 Amman - Jordan, between June 2012 and July 2013. Methodology: The detection software of MATLAB V7 were used (i.e. For signal analyses and processing of the results), a Crystal Piezoelectric microphone (sensor has a sensitivity - 60 dc, 5 mv/pa/1KHz). Sound recorder program (from Jet Audio Program V7.6 for recording sound from microphone and save it on a computer with wav file). Band pass filter (for filtering sounds which we recorded at a certain range of frequency of about 100-20000 Hz). Results: In this work, it was observed and concluded that the sound of the faulty parted has frequency fluctuation higher than frequency fluctuation of good part. In a similar trend found in the energy of sound, where the sound level of the faulty part is found to be much higher than the sound level of the good part. Hence, a healthy monitoring of the huge mechanical system such as vehicles and industrial machines can be achieved as a non destructive testing (NDT). Conclusion: The experimental and theoretical study in this project has been proven to be successful for the failure prevention for vehicle components by the combination of acoustic emission properties and a written code using MatLab software besides using very simple inexpensive signal collector.