An experimental study on cracking mode in reinforced concrete structures using acoustic emission testing

Abstract

This article presents an experimental study on cracking mode in Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures using Acoustic Emission (AE) testing. After few years of construction, it is necessary to assess damage status in RC structures. For rehabilitation of the RC structures, it is required to know whether the cracking in RC structures is due to shear failure or tensile failure. In this study, two known methods namely “relaxation ratio analysis of AE signals” which is based on earthquake phenomena for damage assessment and “Gaussian mixture modeling of AE signals”- a probabilistic method for crack classification in RC beams were used. In these days, these methods were used independently. But in this present study an attempt is made to combine these two methods. This could be interesting for structural health monitoring of RC structures. The differences in AE characteristics during tensile and shear failure in RC structures were emphasized. Relaxation ratio analysis of AE is a useful method to assess damage of the existing RC structures in-situ.