An evaluation of the performance of acoustic emission systems

Nowadays the trend in commercial acoustic emission systems is to digitise on line the acoustic emission signal before any characteristics are extracted. Some new developments in this trend have recently been introduced and commercialised. Prospective buyers of an acoustic emission system now have to decide between different systems. Up to now their decision could only be based on information from the manufacturers or advertisement leaflets. The aim of this paper is to compare the performance of two fully digital acoustic emission systems to make objective information available. Both hardware and software will be addressed and the analysis will be made from the point of view of the end user of the system.