Fast X-ray tomography and acoustic emission study of damage in metals during continuous tensile tests

Model AA-2124 matrix composites with two different reinforcement sizes were pulled with a strain rate of 10-5 using a dedicated tensile rig suitable for in situ tomography. Two main novelty aspects characterize the present study. First, tomography provides a new approach towards understanding the significance of AE signals, recorded simultaneously, during image acquisition on the same sample. The number of acoustic emission events is found to be in good agreement with the number of cracks as detected by image analysis and the energy of the signals is proportional to the dimension of the cracks. Secondly, fast tomography was used to perform the first continuous in situ tensile test. The continuous procedure is compared in the paper with the standard step by step procedure.