Damage Monitoring and Evaluation Using AE Sensors for Existing Concrete Bridges

Abstract

The existing concrete bridges are often required to carry an increasing volume of traffic, higher speed and heavier trucks, so the bridge owners pay more attention to the actual fatigue damage and service safety of such structures. In this paper, Acoustic Emission (AE) sensors are used to monitor and evaluate the fatigue and damage of Yaoxian Bridge, which is the first field AE monitoring using Physical Acoustics Company equipment and sensors in China existing concrete bridge. This AE sensor has fine frequency bandwidth of interest to bridge monitoring, which is applicable to local cracking and damage positions and can monitor fatigue cracks and damage in close-range. In the field inspection, healthy monitoring was conducted at several locations, including the box concrete girder webs, bottom plates and deck plates using AE sensors. Based on AE monitoring data, the fatigue and damage conditions of box concrete girders was analyzed in order to propose theoretical basis and the rational advices for Yaoxian Bridge maintenance.

Bending of beams externally reinforced with TRC and CFRP monitored by DIC and AE

“…Specific AE indexes have been used to identify the moment of critical failures [17,18] much earlier than visual observation or drop of mechanical load readings. Therefore, AE is also applied in the monitoring of fullscale structures [19,20].…”