A methodology to estimate the adhesive bonding defects and the final releasing moments in conical joints based on the acoustic emissions technique

The objective of this work is the investigation of the use of the Acoustic Emissions (AE) technique applied in order to estimate the presence and the entity of the gluing defects in conical adhesive and compression couplings, and to forecast their final releasing moment. It was widely demonstrated in the literature that the presence and the entity of gluing defects is difficult to be estimated with conventional non destructive testing techniques once the parts are assembled together [1, 2]. In this framework, this paper attempts to investigate if a correlation exists between the adhesive defect entity (low, medium and high) and the cumulative counts of AE and also if it is possible to forecast a priori the final releasing moment of the coupling.