Concrete Damage Identification based on Acoustic Emission and Wavelet Neural Network

In order to improve the accuracy of damage source identification in concrete based on acoustic emission testing (AE) and neural networks, and locating and repairing the damage in a practical roller compacted concrete (RCC) dam, a multilevel AE processing platform based on wavelet energy spectrum analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), and a neural network is proposed. Two data sets of 15 basic AE parameters and 23 AE parameters added on the basis of the 15 basic AE parameters were selected as the input vectors of a basic parameter neural network and a wavelet neural network, respectively. Taking the measured tensile data of an RCC prism sample as an example, the results show that compared with the basic parameter neural network, the wavelet neural network achieves a higher accuracy and faster damage source identification, with an average recognition rate of 8.2% and training speed of about 33%.