Acoustic emission monitoring of damage modes in reinforced concrete beams by using narrow partial power bands.

This work presents an acoustic emission (AE) based method, named a series of narrow partial power bands (SN2PB), to monitor the damage mechanisms within reinforced concrete beams during quasi-static bending tests. Unlike conventional time-domain methods, which give a global view of the involved cracking modes, SN2PB has the advantage of obtaining information on cracking modes within each AE hit in reduced frequency bands. SN2PB is applied by dividing the frequency content of each AE signal into narrow bands.