Investigation of acoustic emission signals under a simulative environment of grinding burn

Grinding burn is a common phenomenon of thermal damage that has been one of the main constraints in grinding in respect of high efficiency and quality. An acoustic emission (AE) technique was tried in an attempt to identify grinding burn on-line. However, the AE features of grinding burn are relatively weak and are easily obscured by other AE sources. This paper presents an investigation of the AE features of the thermal expansion induced by laser irradiation, which was designed to simulate grinding thermal behaviour. By using wavelet packet transforms, AE features at the grinding burn temperature can successfully be extracted without other mechanical interferential factors. Such thermal AE features provide a firm foundation for analysing and monitoring the AE features of grinding burn.