Damage Quantification in Concrete under Fatigue Loading Using Acoustic Emission

Acoustic emission (AE) is an effective nondestructive evaluation method for assessing damage in materials; however, few works in the literature have focused on one quantification method of damage in concrete under fatigue loading by using AE for characterizing the entire three main deterioration behaviors simultaneously. These deterioration behaviors include Young’s modulus degradation, fatigue total strain, and residual strain development. In this work, an AE quantification method of fatigue damage in concrete was developed, by combining AE and a fiber bundle-based statistical damage model (fiber bundle-irreversible chain model). By establishing a relationship between normalized AE counts and the damage variable based on the fiber bundle-irreversible chain model, the method was proposed. Additionally, this method was verified against the experimental results. It is able to capture the mechanisms of damage accumulation and characterize the three deterioration behaviors simultaneously.