EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS BY ACOUSTIC EMISSION ON FULL-SCALE PC DECK BEAMS AFTER 50 YEARS OF SERVICE [Keynote]

The AE technique is highly adopted for the structural integrity assessment of materials as well as large-sized structures (buildings, bridges, etc.) due to its ability to offer information on their stability conditions. This paper presents a loading test on a prestressed concrete (PC) full-scale beam. It was taken from a bridge built in Turin (Italy) in 1970 and dismantled in 2018 for urban redevelopment works. The efficacy of the AE technique for determining the progression of damage is confirmed by the observed relations between the measured strain and the recorded AE activity.
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