State-of-the-art structural health monitoring for reinforced concrete structures: Advances in acoustic emission and digital image correlation

The fundamental issue with steel-reinforced concrete constructions is corrosion of the steel bars, which finally leads to the structure's collapse and disintegration. Fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) bars have been widely used in civil engineering used as a substitute for steel reinforcement because it has many advantages such as high strength, light weight, and no corrosion. Moreover, productive technology is becoming more and more mature and industrialized so FRP has become one economic and competitive structure material. Based on the recent research: this paper mainly introduces progress in the studies on concrete structures reinforced with steel or GFRP bars. The contents of this review research article include the cracking/fracture/cracking monitoring of Steel and GFRP reinforced concrete beams in flexure is investigated in the past few years in the world. The possibility of employing Acoustic Emission (AE) and Digital Image Correlation (DIC) to monitor micro and macro cracks generated in reinforced concrete beams will be investigated in this work so that a practical application can be presented. Finally, the integrated technique delivers complimentary information from 'the ear' with the AE and 'the eye' with the DIC.