Abstract
Extensive research and studies on concrete fracture and failure by means of the acoustic emission (AE) technique have shown that fracture and damage growth can be characterized through a single synthetic parameter, namely the b-value, which changes systematically during the different stages of the failure process, as shown by several AE tests carried out from the specimen to the structural scale [Sammonds PR, Meredith PG, Murrel SAF, Main IG. Modelling the damage evolution in rock containing porefluid by acoustic emission. In: Proceedings of the Eurock’94; 1994; Colombo S, Main IG, Forde MC. Assessing damage of reinforced concrete beam using “ b-value” analysis of acoustic emission signals. J Mater Civil Eng ASCE 2003;15:280–6; Carpinteri A, Lacidogna G, Niccolini G. Critical behaviour in concrete structures and damage localisation by Acoustic Emission. Key Eng Mater 2006;312:305–10]. This parameter can be linked to the value of the exponent α of the power-law distribution of the crack size in a damaged structure. In this paper, we propose a statistical interpretation for the variation of the b-value during the evolution of damage, based on a treatment originally proposed by [Carpinteri A. Mechanical damage and crack growth in concrete: plastic collapse to brittle fracture. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers; 1986; Carpinteri A. Decrease of apparent tensile and bending strength with specimen size: two different explanations based on fracture mechanics. Int J Solid Struct 1989;25:407–29; Carpinteri A. Scaling laws and renormalization groups for strength and toughness of disordered materials. Int J Solid Struct 1994;31:291–302]. The proposed model captures the transition from the condition of criticality, in which α = 3, to that of imminent failure, characterized by α = 2, in terms of damage localisation.
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