An Overview of the Study of Acoustic Emissions in Soil Mechanics

Extended Abstract In recent decades, advances in electronics have made it possible to use increasingly complex instrumentation within the many disciplines encompassed by engineering and, specifically, in soil mechanics. Thus, both at the level of field measurements and at the laboratory level, a wide variety of classic instruments, such as strain gauges, force or interstitial pressure transducers, are being modernized, with the electronic nature becoming increasingly important to the detriment of the mechanics. But, in addition to the electronic adaptation of these classic sensors used in soil mechanics, which allows for greater simplicity in data acquisition and subsequent computerized processing, in recent years a series of new techniques (in a more or less experimental phase) are being incorporated into the study of soil mechanics, to provide additional information, sometimes very valuable, to that obtained by classical methods. Within these new techniques is the study of acoustic emissions produced in soils when they are subjected to loading processes or imposed displacement. Based on this technique, scarcely studied to date, an investigation has been initiated that aims to characterize the acoustic emissions generated by soil grains when they are subjected to compression and/or shear processes. The investigations, which are being carried out at the Laboratory of Geotechnics of the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena