Reinforced concrete structures deteriorate under service conditions due to various factors including loading, environment etc. The failure associated with these structures could be either due to flexure, shear, torsion or a combination of these. Understanding the brittle failure due to…
Reinforced concrete structures deteriorate under service conditions due to various factors including loading, environment etc. The failure associated with these structures could be either due to flexure, shear, torsion or a combination of these. Understanding the brittle failure due to shear is of practical importance due to increased use of beams having large depths. Hence, in this study, the acoustic emission (AE) technique is used for monitoring the behaviour of reinforced concrete specimens which fail by shear. The AE data of events, absolute energy and time are analysed to understand the fracture process and energy released. It is seen that, the events of higher energy are located in the region where actual failure took place by the formation of diagonal tension crack due to shear. Thus, the critical failure path in RC beams can be identified through the events of higher energy.