Improved Accuracy of Damage Index Evaluation in Concrete Structures by Simultaneous Hardware Triggering

Non-invasive damage monitoring of concrete structures by means of Acoustic Emission (AE) requires multitransducers, multi-channel acquisition, high sampling frequency and long observation time. Owing to its propagation in concrete, the signal from AE reduces its amplitude during the propagation, and, consequently, some events can be lost due to lower signal intensity than the trigger level set on one sensor only. The innovative proposal discussed in the paper consists in the introduction of a Flat Amplifier and Trigger generator block (FAT) in order to generate a logical trigger when the AE is detected by any transducer. Experimental tests confirm the effectiveness of the FAT to acquire all the AE events and to increase the evaluation accuracy of damage indexes.