Progressive Damage Monitoring in Concrete Structures Using a Probabilistic Approach

This Investigation of progressive damage in concrete beams under three-point bending is carried out using acoustic emission (AE) techniques. AE has proven to be effective for damage detection and localisation due to its high performance in identifying small damage or cracks. This paper proposes a probabilistic approach based on the Particle Filter (PF) method combined with time-frequency analysis to estimate the damage locations from measured AE data. The Stockwell transform (S transform) is used to extract the time of arrival (TOA) from AE measurements, which are then fed into the PF to detect and identify potential damage locations. The proposed method is validated through experimental studies. The widths of the fracture process zone were estimated from the AE source location results. It is confirmed that the estimated AE source locations correlate with the progression of fractures in the material.