AE energy analysis on concrete bridge beams

Concrete bridges were built originally to have a cost-effective maintenance free life of 120 years, however both in Europe and the USA this has proved to the totally optimistic. Concrete bridges require major maintenance after twenty to thirty years in order to extend their life The Acoustic Emission technique has been successfully applied to monitor and provide information on the safety of concrete bridges, but the processing of the AE data is often not trivial. This paper proposes a method of AE analysis to assess concrete bridges based on the fact that the AE energy is one of the effective parameters to evaluate the damage of a concrete structure. Results from experiments on concrete beams with different design and loading configurations are presented. It is argued that in some cases the state of damage of bridge beams can be estimated from the AE energy analysis when approximately 45% of the ultimate load has been applied.