• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.215-224
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• 1997

A study has been made to investigate the acoustic emission(AE) behavior during the tensile and fracture tests of an Al-Li 8090 alloy, and to correlate it with the deformation mechanisms as a function of microstructure and plate orientation. Mechanical tests and AE measurements were conducted on the specimens with different microstructures (the ${\delta}'$ phase dominant microstructure and the $S'+{\delta}'$ microstructure) and with different orientations (L and ST). In the ${\delta}'$ structure, continuous emissions were produced in both the L and ST oriented specimens, while only the burst emissions were observed to occur in the $S'+{\delta}'$ structure. It was inferred from the above results that continuous type emissions were mainly attributed to the shearing of coherent ${\delta}'$ precipitates in the ${\delta}'$ structure, while the burst type emissions were produced due to the shearing or microcracking of incoherent S' phase in the $S'+{\delta}'$ structure. As to the effect of plate orientation, the ST oriented specimens showed more burst emissions than the LT oriented ones. A large number of burst emissions produced in the ST specimen were presumably due to the rapid crack propagation along the intergranular boundary located parallel to the crack propagation direction.