Acoustic emission (AE) technology, a new method to detect the breaking signal of grinding wheel rotation test is introduced.The time and frequency domain of the signals are studied by collecting the AE signals of background, idling, no-load, loading.Comparison the characteristic AE signals of grinding wheel after crushing and crushing before, we find that the characteristic voltage value of time domain signal increases by 2.5times, the peak value of the energy spectrum increases by 4times, the RMS value increases by 1.17 times and a high frequency voltage signal is obtained by means of fast Flourier transform (FFT) of the frequency domain.The results show that the acoustic emission technology is more suitable for the field of grinding wheel breaking test, which is superior to the commonly used vibration method, volume method and photoelectric method.