An Ultrasound Technique for the Characterization of the Acoustic Emission of Reinforced Concrete Beam

Among the various non-destructive techniques for health monitoring in structures, the Acoustic Emission (AE) is well known in scientific literature. Ultrasonic waves emitted by the creation and propagation of cracks in concrete or Reinforced Concrete specimens are usually collected by means of ultrasonic sensors. The signals must be treated in front-end readout process with preamplifiers and filters, to be able to set a proper trigger level and to cut the background noise (belonging to different frequency ranges). In addition, the post processing of the data is important to “clean up” the dataset, removing fake events, and to extract the proper information, useful for structure damage assessment. In this paper, the authors present the experimental set up and the transducers used to acquire the AE signals recorded during a four-point bending test on a RC beam. The ad hoc realized amplifier and filtering circuit used in the test are also described. Then, an example of an AE signal is also reported, in terms of frequency spectrum analysis and noise filtering