Assessment of the stress corrosion cracking in a chloride medium of cables used in prestressed concrete structures by the acoustic emission technique

Abstract

In this paper, two main types of corrosion, localized corrosion and stress corrosion cracking (SCC) of cables used in prestressed concrete structures, were characterized and identified by acoustic emission (AE) analysis using extracted AE parameters. A novel analysis of the AE parameters using the principal component analysis (PCA) was done to discriminate localized corrosion from SCC. First, K-mean was used as an unsupervised method, and then to validate the clustering analysis k-nearest neighbour was used as a supervised method. The correlations of the AE parameters including amplitude, counts, hits and time were also used to identify corrosion mechanisms. In addition, the corrosion process characteristics of each type were explained by applying the AE signal analysis (time–frequency). Experimental results show the ability of AE to evaluate a crack propagation rate of 10−7 m s−1 in a chloride medium. Microscopic examinations revealed a mixed mode of crack propagation, modes I (shear-like mechanism) and II (cleavage-like mechanism), characterized by a multi-terrace appearance on the fractured steel surface.