Acoustic Emission Test in Visualizing Crack Progression for Concrete Beams

In this paper, acoustic emission (AE) test was used to assess concrete beams having a size of 100mm x 100mm x 400mm length with water-cement ratio of 0.50. Two types of beam were considered, plain concrete beams and short steel fiber-reinforced beams. There were three parameters used in acoustic emission test: AE hits, AE location, and AE energy.The total AE hits were divided into three percentile of AE energy all throughout the test. These are 100th, 25th, and 10th percentile of AE energy. This was done to differentiate significant AE signals with large AE energy from the less significant AE signals with small energy. It was found out that short steel fiber-reinforced concrete beams produced large number of total AE hits compared to ordinary concrete beams. The crack progression was clearly visualized at 10th percentile of AE energy.