Acoustic Emission Signatures of the High-strength Concrete Failure with Different Loading Rates

Concrete is the most widely used material in civil engineering, which has many advantages in terms of strength, accessibility, and durability. Currently, the high-strength concrete has been used in some projects. However, its failure mode is more complex than the regular concrete. Especially for the loading rate, it may significantly affect the failure mode. Therefore, it is essential to quantify the process of the failure for better application of high-strength concrete with consideration loading rate. Due to many merits of acoustic emission (AE), it has been successfully used for evaluating the progress of concrete damage. Therefore, in this study, the experiments were proposed to correlate the AE with failure mode in the high-strength concrete. As progress of the damage, the AE activities show highly related to the mechanical response. Additionally, the loading rate directly related to the failure mode is also considered. Compared with the regular concrete, the failure of the high-strength concrete shows more brittle behavior. And the phase of AE signals has been changed from obvious three stages to two stages with increase of loading rate, which can be used for further identification of failure mode.