Propagation characteristics of acoustic emission wave in reinforced concrete

Abstract

Due to the complexity of components and damage mechanism of reinforced concrete, the wave propagation characteristics in reinforced concrete are always complicated and difficult to determine. The objective of this article is to study the failure process of reinforced concrete structure under the damage caused by pencil-broken. A new method on the basis of the acoustic emission technique and the Hilbert-Huang transform theory is proposed in this work. By using acoustic emission technique, the acoustic emission wave signal is generating while the real-time damage information and the strain field of the reinforced concrete structure is receiving simultaneously. Based on the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) theory, the peak frequency characteristics of the acoustic emission signals were extracted to identify the damage modes of the reinforced concrete structure. The results demonstrate that this method can quantitatively investigate the acoustic emission wave propagation characteristic in reinforced concrete structures and might also be promising in other civil constructions. Keywords: Acoustic emission, Reinforced concrete structure, Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT), Propagation characteristics