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Evaluation of damage accumulation in masonry by means of acoustic emission technique

Book Contribution - Book Chapter Conference Contribution

The interest in acoustic emission (AE) as a monitoring technique to assess the damage evolution in masonry structures is recently gaining field. The AE technique detects transient energy waves emitted by a material as a result of stress redistributions. Therefore, the technique requires an external load to be imposed on the structure, such as a mechanical, thermal or chemical loading. In this paper, the focus is on long-term monitoring and the use of AE-monitoring to assess damage evolution under sustained stresses, such as damage-accumulation during creep phenomena in masonry. A laboratory test campaign is set up, during which long-term creep tests are performed on masonry specimens at different stress levels. The latter are increased at specific time intervals. In addition to stress-strain and crack monitoring, AE-monitoring is performed at discrete moments in time. Both sources of data are used to validate the AE-monitoring technique to assess the damage accumulation. Hereby, both damage initiation due to load increment and the damage accumulation due to time-dependent deformation under sustained loading are addressed. In this paper, focus is both on the added value and limitations of the AE for damage assessment. The results indicate that the acoustic emission technique is able to detect the damage-accumulation in the masonry, in particular the instable damage increase during the tertiary creep phase, thereby predicting the failure of the test specimen
Book: 1st International RILEM Conference on On Site Assessment of Concrete, Masonry and Timber Structures
Pages: 683 - 692
ISBN:978-2-35158-062-2
Publication year:2008
Accessibility:Closed