Interpretation of Fatigue Damage Evolution in RC Slabs by Means of Innovative 3D AE Tomography

Abstract

The authors have been studying NDT based techniques that have potential to exhibit damage not only qualitatively but quantitatively. In the paper, two major aspects contributing to the damage have been introduced: a prospective damage index representing real internal condition; and damage visualization techniques with an acoustic approach, namely AE tomography. For a prospective damage index, Q-value, an attenuation feature of stress wave and can be treated as an irrespective parameter of frequency is demonstrated using several types of specimens changing the volume of artificial damage. And as for an innovative and the latest NDT technology, 3D AE tomography, which can visualize the internal 3D damage evolution, only from one side access situation, is introduced, followed by experimental verification using RC slabs subjected to cyclic mobile loads.

Structural condition assessment of reinforced-concrete bridges based on acoustic emission and strain measurements

“…Fatigue of reinforced concrete belongs to the most studied research topics and AE technique has been widely used for fatigue crack detection and classification [8,21,26,29,37]. Nevertheless, many essential questions have not been answered so far.…”