Abstract
In this work, acoustic emission (AE) monitoring was correlated with in-situ optical microscopy observation and electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) measurements to investigate the evolution of a single stress corrosion crack in SUS420J2 stainless steel subjected to chloride droplet corrosion. A single dominant crack evolution was observed to transition from a slow initiation of active path corrosion-dominant cracking to a rapid propagation of hydrogen-assisted cracking. The initiation-to-propagation was concomitant with a significant increase in the number of AE events. In addition, a cluster analysis of the AE features including traditional waveform parameters and fast Fourier transform (FFT)-derived frequency components was performed using k-means algorithms. Two AE clusters with different frequency levels were extracted. Correlated with the EBSD-derived kernel average misorientation (KAM) map of crack path, low-frequency AE cluster was found to correspond with the location of plastic deformation in the propagation region. High-frequency AE cluster is supposed to be from the cracking process. The correlation between AE feature and SCC progression is expected to provide an AE signals-based in-situ insight into the SCC monitoring.
Fig. 5 The AE activity of amplitude and cumulative events and the profile of pit size plus dominant crack length over the time evolution. Here, marked points “a–i” are consistent with the sequences indicated in Fig. 4.
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