Corrosion of the reinforcement is one of the major deterioration mechanisms in existing reinforced concrete (RC) structures causing considerable costs for maintenance and repair. The devel- opment of reliable tools to localise and characterise such damage is essential to assess…
Corrosion of the reinforcement is one of the major deterioration mechanisms in existing reinforced concrete (RC) structures causing considerable costs for maintenance and repair. The devel- opment of reliable tools to localise and characterise such damage is essential to assess the structural capacity. This paper investigates the use of the acoustic emission (AE) technique during an accel- erated corrosion process of reinforced concrete prisms. AE monitoring was performed continuously during the corrosion process using six sensors to allow localisation of the AE events in 3D. A sample with and without a stirrup was tested. An AE testing and post-processing protocol was developed and will be discussed in this paper. A signal-based clustering algorithm was developed to distinguish different AE sources from each other. Results show that damage could be localised correctly in both samples. Different types of signals could be distinguished by the clustering algorithm. This was com- paredwithcrackwidthmeasurements,timeofarrival,locationandRA-AFanalysis. Itwasconcluded that mainly concrete cracking was recorded and localised by AE sensing in both samples.