Role of superposition of dislocation avalanches in the statistics of acoustic emission during plastic deformation

Various dynamical systems with many degrees of freedom display avalanche dynamics, which is characterized by scale invariance reflected in power-law statistics. The superposition of avalanche processes in real systems driven at a finite velocity may influence the experimental determination of the underlying power law. The present paper reports results of an investigation of this effect using the example of acoustic emission (AE) accompanying plastic deformation of crystals. Indeed, recent studies of AE did not only prove that the dynamics of crystal defects obeys power-law statistics, but also led to a hypothesis of universality of the scaling law. We examine the sensitivity of the apparent statistics of AE to the parameters applied to individualize AE events. Two different alloys, MgZr and AlMg, both displaying strong AE but characterized by different plasticity mechanisms, are investigated. It is shown that the power-law indices display a good robustness in wide ranges of parameters even in the conditions leading to very strong superposition of AE events, although some deviations from the persistent values are also detected. The totality of the results confirms the scale-invariant character of deformation processes on the scale relevant to AE, but uncovers essential differences between the power-law exponents found for two kinds of alloys.