Acoustic emission monitoring of damage concrete structures by multi-triggered acquisition system

The paper deals with the damage monitoring of concrete material structures by analysing the crack evolution by means of Acoustic Emission (AE). This analysis requires multi transducers, high sampling frequency and long time of observation. Triggered acquisition modality needs to avoid the saving of big size digitalized data. Due to the propagation in the concrete, the AE reduces its amplitude during the path, and, consequently, some events can be loosed due to the intensity lower than the trigger level. The proposal consists in the introduction of the Flat Amplifier and Trigger generator block (FAT) in order to generate a logical trigger when the AE is detected by one of the transducers. The experimental validation to assess the effectiveness of the acquisition system set up is performed according with the standard for AE in the concrete.