scope:

Technical principles will be discussed which must be followed in order to insure that a technically sound Acoustic Emission (AE) test is performed on a composite sample. It is relatively simple to attach an AE sensor to a composite and then load the sample. It is a much more complicated process to carry out an AE test that conforms to the known physics relating to AE testing. This handbook will assume that the reader is planning on doing "production testing" of composites with AE monitoring ("production testing" in the sense that at least several identical samples will be tested). The organization of this handbook will be to treat first each of the physical entities involved in an AE composite test; then aspects such as AE data and its analysis will be treated.