Damage assessment of reinforced concrete beam with various depths by using acoustic emission technique
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Date
2011-06-01
Authors
Majed A. A. Aldahdooh
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Abstract
This study aimed at using the Acoustic Emission (AE) in Structure Health Monitoring (SHM), since three categories of reinforced concrete (RC) beams (a total of 12 RC beams) with difference depth of beams. The study sample were tested in four-point bending setup under monotonic and stepwise loading, each category of RC beams contained four beams, one beam for monotonic loading and three beams for stepwise loading. All beams encountered flexural failure mode. In collecting the AE data, MICRO -SAMOS (μSAMOS) Digital AE system and R6I sensor were used, as AEwin software was used to analyze the data. Moreover, visual observation was conducted to compare with the AE results. The main interest of this research was to investigate the capability of AE in locating the concrete specimen’s cracks besides investigating the cumulative absolute energy for different mechanical behaviors of those cracks. On the other hand, Intensity Analysis (IA) method was used to quantified the damage level of the RC-beams associated with the crack flexural failure. The proposed method introduced that the differences of crack locations between visual observation and AE sources are between 25mm and 55mm. Also by comparing the visual observation to the AE result, when the cumulative absolute energy exceeds 1.0 x 106 attoJoule (aJ), the onset of the first crack occurs, and the recommended action at this stage is typically minor surface defects. Moreover, when the specimens affected by localization damage, the absolute energy increases dramatically for about five to seven times.