Recent Developments in Acoustic Emission and Non-Destructive Evaluation

Dear Colleagues,

Acoustic emission (AE) has evolved into a versatile non-destructive evaluation (NDE) technique, now widely used in areas ranging from civil and mechanical structures to energy systems, advanced materials, and manufacturing processes for real-time damage detection, integrity assessment, and condition monitoring under service conditions. At the same time, the rapid development of digital twins, NDE 4.0, and artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to transform AE from a standalone diagnostic tool into a core data source for physics-informed and data-driven virtual representations of assets, enabling more intelligent, predictive, and life-cycle-oriented structural health management. We invite authorsto submit contributions to this Special Issue that both reflect the breadth of AE applications and demonstrate how AE can be integrated with emerging digital and AI technologies in non-destructive evaluation.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• AE-based damage detection and characterization in civil, mechanical, aerospace, and energy structures;
• AE applications in manufacturing and machinery;
• Advanced AE sensing technologies and multi-component and hybrid NDE systems;
• Digital twins and NDE 4.0 concepts incorporating AE data;
• Mechanism- and data-driven methods for AE signal processing, source localization, pattern recognition, and prognosis.

Dr. Xing Cai
Dr. Shan Wu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.