Towards the Establishment of a Continuous Nondestructive Monitoring Technique for Fresh Concrete

Despite the fact that concrete is the most widely used construction material, conventional techniques for the estimation of the mechanical properties are only applicable to the hardened material. Moreover, concerning the fresh concrete examination, the already existing techniques provide only qualitative information, are not representative over the full time period of curing, setting and hardening or have limited accuracy and repeatability. In this study, the acoustic emission (AE) technique is employed in order to investigate the activity within fresh concrete as early as a few minutes after mixing. Several processes like settlement, segregation, formation and migration of air bubbles, as well as formation of hydrates produce AEs which so far have not been properly examined in literature. The first and foremost goal is to check the capacity of the new AE setup to record emissions earlier than previous studies (just after casting). The next goal concerns the possibility to characterize the different types of emissions relatively to their original source mechanism while the final goal would be the investigation of possible correlations between the early age acoustic activity and the final mechanical properties. For this reason, an AE setup is applied utilizing the favorable wave transmission properties of the metal casting molds, which act as a sort of waveguide. After validating its sensitivity, several laboratory tests are performed in concrete with varying water and aggregate content. It is found that the rate of AE activity follows trends similar to the typical hydration curves known from literature and is also indicative of the mix parameters. Finally, it should be mentioned that it is the first study that exploits the acoustic activity as early as the moment of mixing while apart from the number of emissions which is usually examined, the monitoring includes waveform parameters that show strong characterization potential.