LAUSR

Abstract Since concrete infrastructure may lose its expected physical and functional properties over time, accurate inspection and assessment of such infrastructure systems is necessary to ensure safety and serviceability and prevent unsafe working conditions and the occurrence of hazards. In this paper, an experimental investigation was conducted on several concrete specimens under uniaxial compression to fully explore the fracture process and mechanical characteristics of concrete materials under compressive loading conditions. More specifically, a high-resolution industrial camera and a real-time geophysical acquisition system were employed to capture the fracture process and the microseismic (MS) and electromagnetic emission (EME) signals simultaneously. Based on digital image processing, a robust crack extraction algorithm was proposed for automatically identifying cracks on a concrete surface at the pixel level, and then two novel crack features were introduced to depict the dynamic crack propagation process quantitatively. Then, the correlation between MS, EME, stress drop and dynamic crack evolution characteristics was analyzed. The results indicate that: (1) the MS and EME signals of the concrete specimens have good consistency in the time domain, especially in the fully fractured stage; (2) the crack area, to a certain extent, can reflect the stress drop of a concrete specimen under the compression fracture process; (3) the crack propagation velocity parallel to the loading axis (along the vertical direction) is faster than that the perpendicular one to the loading axis (along the horizontal direction); and (4) the crack area, stress, MS signal, and EME signal reach their peak values nearly simultaneously. Finally, a novel mesh-free numerical model based on peridynamic (PD) theory was established to simulate the fracture process, and the displacement fields were presented to further reveal the failure mechanism of concrete under compressive loading.