Abstract
Concrete bridges were built originally to have a cost-effective maintenance free life of 120 years, however both in Europe and the USA this has proved to the totally optimistic. Concrete bridges require major maintenance after twenty to thirty years in order to extend their life The Acoustic Emission technique has been successfully applied to monitor and provide information on the safety of concrete bridges, but the processing of the AE data is often not trivial. This paper proposes a method of AE analysis to assess concrete bridges based on the fact that the AE energy is one of the effective parameters to evaluate the damage of a concrete structure. Results from experiments on concrete beams with different design and loading configurations are presented. It is argued that in some cases the state of damage of bridge beams can be estimated from the AE energy analysis when approximately 45% of the ultimate load has been applied.
Résumé
À l'origine, on construisait des ponts en béton pour obtenir une excellente rentabilité car on pensait qu'ils, n'auraient besoin d'aucun entretien pendant 120 ans; cependant en Europe et aux États-unis, on s'est rendu compte que cet espoir était tout à fait optimiste. Il faut entretenir les ponts en béton après 20 ou 30 ans afin de prolonger leur durée de vie. On a utilisé le procédé technique de l'Émission Acoustique (E.A.) avec succès pour contrôler l'état des ponts et obtenir des renseignements sur leur sécurité mais l'analyse des résultats est souvent difficile. Dans cet article, on propose une méthode d'analyse de l'E.A. basée sur le fait que l'énergie de l'Émission Acoustique est l'un des paramètres les plus efficaces pour évaluer le degré d'endommagement d'une structure en béton. On présente les résultats d'expériences sur des poutres en béton qui different de par leur conception et leurs chargements. On suggère que dans certains cas on peut estimer l'état d'endommagement des poutres du pont d'après l'analyse de l'énergie de l'E.A. lorsqu'on a appliqué à peu près 45% du chargement total.
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Colombo, S., Forde, M.C., Main, I.G. et al. AE energy analysis on concrete bridge beams. Mat. Struct. 38, 851–856 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02481658
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02481658