TimeFrequency Analysis of Barkhausen Noise for the Needs of Anisotropy Evaluation of GrainOriented Steels The paper presents a new approach to obtain information on magnetic anisotropy in Sixe2x80x93Fe grain oriented ferromagnetic steel based on the observation of the magnetic Barkhausen noise (MBN). Until now, in the literature one can only notice the MBN study of magnetic anisotropy in steels carried out in a single time or frequency domain. However, due to the observed high variability of the dynamics of the MBN phenomenon over its occurrence period, depending on the steel properties, the idea of utilization of combined time and frequency representations to obtain new or supplementary information arises. For this purpose, the MBN phenomenon was observed in various directions for steels with oriented magnetic properties. Then, using the shorttime Fourier transform, timefrequency (TF) distributions were determined and features vectors enabling the quantification of crucial information were determined. Before performing the final experiments, a series of tests were carried out for different measuring conditions. As a result, it was possible to adjust the conditions enabling us to obtain the highest possible sensitivity for MBN and discrimination level between directional properties in the material. Then, an algorithm of detailed analysis and division of the TF representation into subranges was proposed, enabling the extraction of more detailed information about the phenomena occurring during the magnetization process. This allowed us to clearly indicate and then separate three areas of MBN main activity. Finally, the obtained angular distributions of selected features were presented and discussed, and further conclusions were given.

Noise Reduction of Welding Crack AE Signal Based on EMD and Wavelet Packet The acoustic emission (AE) signal collected by a sensor in the welding process has an overlapping frequency band and weak characteristics under a complex noise background. It is difficult for the wavelet noise reduction method, with single basis function, to effectively match the different characteristic information of the welding crack AE signal. Taking into account the adaptive decomposition characteristics of Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), a novel wavelet packet noise reduction method for welding AE signal was proposed. The welding AE signal was adaptively decomposed into several Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) by the EMD. The effective IMFs were selected by the frequency distribution characteristics of the welding crack AE signal. A wavelet packet, with a specific basis function, was subsequently performed on the effective IMFs, which were reconstructed to be the welding crack AE signal. The simulated and experimental results indicated that the proposed method can effectively achieve noise reduction of the welding crack AE signal, which provided a mean for structure crack detection in the welding process.