This paper presents the overview of aArtificial Neural Network (ANN) in the scope of civil engineering application. ANN is one of the artificial intelligence (AI) applications which are currently one of the effective methods used by engineers and researchers to solve technical problems in many scopes of engineering field. One of the explicit criteria of ANN is the ability of the network to deal with the incomplete data and have the capability of learning from experience. This network is also able to adapt to new and changing situation or environment.

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Concrete structures have been facing several types of damage mechanisms during their lifetime. Mostly, the types are commonly defects in concretes structures are crack formations. Therefore, evaluation methods such as acoustic emission (AE) are required for assessing the deterioration on concrete structures. This paper gives a brief on the evaluations of the acoustic emission signal strength to the health monitoring of reinforced concrete structure beam. Small scale size beam have been used for this investigation and the AE signal processing are the main principal data in this work for assessing by using the statistical quantitative technique, which is known as intensity analysis (IA).This type of technique is able to quantify and evaluate the damage severity on concrete structures. Eventually, by using the AE signal strength data, the results indicates are greater instruments in determining the damage mechanism level on concretes structure.

Acoustic emission is an effective damage assessment method in a structure subjected to mechanical loading. Calculation of log-linear slope of the frequency-magnitude distribution of acoustic emission (known as b-value) has been carried out. It is found that the b-valuefor the log frequency-magnitude graph has a good correlation for beam imposed of stepwise loading.It also can be seen that the b-value is decreased as the load increased.

This paper summarized the recent development within the application of acoustic emission technique in the formation of fracture process zone and the AE energy released during the fracture process in concrete beam specimens. AE technique is a non destructive technique which is a useful tool to study the energy released during the different failure mechanisms in different types of materials and fracture process is one of the failure mechanisms in concrete. Most of the researchers were applied three point bending test on plain concrete in order to determine the facture process zone of the concrete and some of them were used numerical modeling to verify their results. The results between AE data and experimental in different parameters such as specimens size and aggregate size are normally compared. As a conclusion, AE technique is a very useful tool to determine the fracture process zone in concrete.