On-site Evaluation of Fatigue Damage in Concrete Bridge Deck with Innovative NDT

This study is devoted to develop a non-destructive testing (NDT) method for detecting aggregated regions from pavement surfaces by capturing the acoustic emissions (AE) when the concrete bridge deck is subjected to normal vehicle loads. To verify the feasibility of the present method, incremental cyclic loading tests were conducted on two laboratory-scale specimens, one with a modelled aggregation region and the other with none. It is encouraging that the aggregation region may yield a great amount of AE activities, significantly more than the non-aggregation region, under loads of similar order to normal vehicle loads. The peak-amplitude distribution of AE signals could be a practical index to differential the aggregation from nonaggregation region. AE sensor of 30 kHz resonance is proper to monitor the AE activities in the aggregation region. doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/321