Abstract
Abstract Acoustic emission (AE) was studied in stressed structural beams composed of internally reinforced concrete with additional external reinforcement from thin bonded plates. A control beam without a bonded plate was compared to four beams having plates composed of carbon fibre composite, glass fibre composite, aramid fibre composite and steel. The dependence of acoustic emission on beam stiffness is described as well as a relation of the number of AE energy peaks to the number of visible cracks in the concrete. The Kaiser effect was observed in repeated loadings for all tested beams. Attenuation was measured to a distance of 2.75 m and was not found to be a limitation in acquiring useful data. The change in event rate and the energy above threshold were closely related to the number of cracks visible at the end of the test. The event rate consistently decreaed as the number of loading cycles increased. The results suggest that an examination of cumulative acoustic emission events and energy as a function of load can assist in analysing the cracking behaviour, loading history and stiffness of concrete beams externally reinforced with bonded surface plates.
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