Using Acoustic Emission to monitor fatigue damage and healing in Asphalt Concrete

Abstract

This paper presents an Acoustic Emission (AE) characterization of damage accumulation and strength recovery in Asphalt Concrete (AC) mixture. A series of uniaxial tensile cyclic tests with and without rest period has been conducted on a 19 mm nominal maximum size of aggregate (NMSA) AC at 20 o C. During the fatigue tests, key AE parameters including emission counts were acquired from two piezo-type sensors attached to the middle of a 150 mm high, 75 mm diameter cylindrical specimen. Test results indicate that accumulative AE energy and AE count may be used not only to assess the initiation and propagation of fatigue damage, but also to quantify the beneficial effect of rest period on the performance of AC. The frequency-amplitude analysis shows that crack formations coincide with the peaks of maximum AE amplitude (A max ) with higher frequencies, while healing is best described by A max with lower frequencies during the rest periods. In addition, it is demonstrated that the Kaiser effect, the stress dependence of AE generation, does not hold for fatigue in AC.

Instantaneous baseline structural damage detection using a miniaturized piezoelectric guided waves system

“…In recent Structural Health Monitoring (SHM)/Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) applications, innovative sensing technologies utilizing appropriate software and hardware systems for data acquisition/reduction are strongly required (Heo and Jeon, 2009;Seo and Kim, 2008;Yun and Jang, 2008). Particularly, on the use of the guided wave propagation method launching an elastic wave through the structure to detect or locate incipient cracks, the changes in wave attenuation, time-delay, and/or reflection can be sensed by piezoelectric sensors-based structural monitoring system (Raghavan and Cesnik, 2007).…”

Experiment of Tension-compression Fatigue and Damage for Asphalt Mixtures

“…where , E o is the initial modulus of elasticity , which considers the modulus of the 100th load cycle while analy zing test results [12] ; (T is the stress amplitude applied by the fatigue test; E is the modulus of elasticity of the test specimen after loading N times; B is the strain amplitude of the test specimen after loading N times; and D is the damage value after loading N times. Damage variable is defined based on the degradation of the elastic modulus , and is expressed as equation (4) .…”

Fatigue Crack Propagation in Plain Concrete Beams by Acoustic Emission Technique

“…There is very little information available in literature regarding the application of acoustic emission technique for studying fatigue crack growth in plain concrete. Apart from some attempts to evaluate fatigue damage for reinforced concrete slab [10] and asphalt concrete [11], very little has been reported in the literature on the use of AE technique for monitoring the fatigue crack growth in concrete.…”