Advances on the acoustic emission testing for monitoring of granular soils

Abstract

The application of the acoustic emission (AE) method for granular media has been considered to be challenging and remains limited. Nevertheless, recent successful explorations from different aspects have greatly encouraged people's attempts in this filed. Typical applications concerning geotechnical element testing, the soil-structure systems, as well as the AE source location suggest that the recent studies aim to obtain direct insights into the mechanical behaviors of the granular soils based on AE features, and emphasize on the quantitative relations between them. Future development of the AE method demands further advances in the following aspects: higher performance of AE instrumentation technology enabling high signal-to-noise ratio; full waveform and broadband signal data acquisition; new insights into the source mechanisms of AE by incorporating more comprehensive and in-depth signal analysis and emerging new technologies; higher levels of correlation study between AE signals and the associated physical processes.