Acoustic emission response of sintered alumina zirconia composite during grooving process

Ceramic composite materials are used as structural materials in automobiles, aerospace and biomedical applications. Assembly or mounting of structural parts requires machining such as grooving or drilling of the ceramic parts. Micro grooving studies are conducted on Alumina Zirconia ceramics at different conditions of load, angle of inclination, grooving speed and nose radius of the indenter. For defect free machining of ceramics one has to opt for ductile mode of machining, which calls for controlled depth and feed, apart from tool geometry. In order to assess the ductile brittle regime during the machining process, Acoustic Emission (AE) signals are used. The signals are processed and several features are extracted from the signal to effectively characterize the material response. AE responses such as counts, count rate, number of events, event rate, count to event ratio, rise time, event duration and Root Mean Square (RMS) were considered for the analysis. The monitored features clearly distinguish the modes of grooving.