Acoustic emission monitoring of damage modes in reinforced concrete beams by using narrow partial power bands

This work presents an acoustic emission (AE) based method, named a series of narrow partial power bands (SN2PB), to monitor the damage mechanisms within reinforced concrete beams during quasi-static bending tests. Unlike conventional time-domain methods, which give a global view of the involved cracking modes, SN2PB has the advantage of obtaining information on cracking modes within each AE hit in reduced frequency bands. SN2PB is applied by dividing the frequency content of each AE signal into narrow bands. Results show that the same AE signal can contain shear and tension cracking signatures at the lower and upper frequency bands, respectively. This work shows also the presence of a transitional domain between the two distinct bands. Changes and fluctuations corresponding to the involved mechanisms during the entire mechanical tests are therefore followed and visualized in the form of a heatmap. Moreover, the densities of the shear and tensile mechanisms at an instant are also determined using a Gaussian Mixture Model. Results show that the separation obtained using the SN2PB method is more advantageous than that of the conventional method based on the average frequency and the RA parameter.