Much has been said in literature about the fracture energy of concrete and its importance. Many important structures like nuclear containment vessels contain very thick concrete components of the order of a metre in size. Certainly size effect should be…
Much has been said in literature about the fracture energy of concrete and its importance. Many important structures like nuclear containment vessels contain very thick concrete components of the order of a metre in size. Certainly size effect should be present in such structures. Fracture energy needs to be deter- mined in order to assess the brittleness of such structures. It is also observed that AE energy could be related to fracture energy. Having said that, it is needed to understand the behavior of AE energy with several pa- rameters of concrete like its strength and size. In the present work the results of such a study are presented. As fracture energy is size dependent, it may not be very useful unless its size dependency is eliminated. In the present study, experiments were conducted to use Acoustic emission (AE) energy as a quantitative measure of size-independent specific fracture energy of concrete beams and the concepts of boundary effect and local fracture energy are used.