A probabilistic approach for damage identification and crack mode classification in reinforced concrete structures

Abstract

Reinforced concrete is subjected to deterioration due to aging, increased load, and natural hazards. To minimize the maintenance costs and to increase the operation lifetime, researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in improving current nondestructive evaluation technologies or building advanced structural health monitoring strategies. Acoustic emission methods offer an attractive solution for nondestructive evaluation/structural health monitoring of reinforced concrete structures. In particular, monitoring the development of cracks is of large interest because their properties reflect not only the condition of concrete as material but also the condition of the entire system at structural level. This article presents a new probabilistic approach based on Gaussian mixture modeling of acoustic emission to classify crack modes in reinforced concrete structures. Experimental results obtained in a full-scale reinforced concrete shear wall subjected to reversed cyclic loading are used to demonstrate and validate the proposed approach.

Experimental Structural Analysis of Hybrid Composite-Concrete Beams by Digital Image Correlation (DIC) and Acoustic Emission (AE)

“…As already mentioned, the design at hand may suffer from several different fracture mechanisms: tensile cracking of the GFR.IPC box, debonding between the GFR.IPC box and concrete, cracking or crushing of concrete and -in case a carbon strip is attached-debonding between the strip and In several materials, and concrete in particular, signals with high frequency indicators (average frequency, AF) and short rise time (RT, see Fig. 10), indicate fracture events of tensile character while when signals become longer this usually implies a shift to a more shear character including delaminations and fibre pull-out [24,28,29]. This is also expressed by an increase of "RA" which is the ratio of RT over amplitude and it measures the inverse of the initial rising angle of the waveform (see again Fig.…”

Influence of geometry on the fracturing behavior of textile reinforced cement monitored by acoustic emission

“…1. The important parameters include the amplitude, A, the rise time, RT, the RA-value which is RT over A. RT and RA are well related to the cracking mode, and specifically obtain low values for tensile phenomena and higher for shear either in the form of delaminations [7] or cracking due to shear stresses [8][9][10]. Frequency content is measured by the average frequency, AF, which is roughly the number of cycles over the duration or the peak frequency, PF, which is the frequency component with the highest magnitude after FFT of the waveform.…”

The Influence of Sensor Size on Acoustic Emission Waveforms—A Numerical Study

“…In general, the frequency and the gravity of the waveforms (energy distributed between the early or later part) are well correlated to the corresponding fracture modes in bulk media like concrete or composite plates [7][8][9]. Since damage characterization is based on the received waveforms, the performance of the sensors is of utmost importance.…”