Numerical simulation of cracking and AE scaling in quasi-brittle materials

Acoustic Emission (AE) has recently been exploited by the authors in order to assess the safety of civil structures and to get an estimate of the residual expected time to failure. AE can be measured in compressive tests, as well as in more complex in situ tests like the single and double flat jack test. In the present paper, an attempt is made in order to investigate numerically the relation between AE and cracking evolution. Special care is devoted to the scaling of cracking and AE, which is crucial when stepping from the laboratory test specimens to large size structures. The pure compression and the double flat-jack tests will be presented in details, considering specimens of increasing sizes. The numerical results confirm that cracking and AE share the same scaling laws.