ACOUSTIC
EMISSION & NDT SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS
Hydrogen Cylinder Acoustic Emission Testing and Data
Evaluation with Supervised Pattern Recognition
NDT.net – September 2002, Vol. 7 No. 09:
http://www.ndt.net/v07n09.htm
A.
N. Tsimogiannis, V. N. Nikolaidis, A. A. Anastasopoulos
Acoustic Emission (AE) has been
extensively applied to vessel testing during pressurization, and
has proven to be a fast and economic method for structural
integrity assessment. High-pressure hydrogen cylinders are
commonly tested with AE in-service, pressurizing with product,
to verify fitness for service and to detect developing flaws at
early stages. Testing large numbers of such cylinders and the
presence of extraneous noise due to filling/pressurization
processes and other sources can make AE data analysis difficult
and time consuming. This paper presents work carried out for the
analysis of hydrogen cylinder AE data, utilizing Supervised
Pattern Recognition (SPR) techniques from modern AE software, in
order to discriminate developing crack data from other data (e.g.
noise) in an effort to automate the analysis process for large
scale testing and increase confidence of the results. This work
has led to the successful creation of a classifier to automate
the discrimination between AE data from developing cracks and
other indications, as diagnosed by follow-up NDT for
verification, leading to minimum data analysis time.