Acoustic Emission Wave Velocity Measurement of Asphalt Mixture by Arbitrary Wave Method

Abstract

The wave velocity of acoustic emission (AE) can reflect the properties of materials, the types of AE sources and the propagation characteristics of AE in materials. At the same time, the wave velocity of AE is also an important parameter in source location calculation by the time-difference method. In this paper, a new AE wave velocity measurement method, the arbitrary wave (AW) method, is proposed and designed to measure the AE wave velocity of an asphalt mixture. This method is compared with the pencil lead break (PLB) method and the automatic sensor test (AST) method. Through comparison and analysis, as a new wave velocity measurement method of AE, the AW method shows the following advantages: A continuous AE signal with small attenuation, no crosstalk and a fixed waveform can be obtained by the AW method, which is more advantageous to distinguish the first arrival time of the acoustic wave and calculate the wave velocity of AE more accurately; the AE signal measured by the AW method has the characteristics of a high frequency and large amplitude, which is easy to distinguish from the noise signal with the characteristics of a low frequency and small amplitude; and the dispersion of the AE wave velocity measured by the AW method is smaller, which is more suitable for the measurement of the AE wave velocity of an asphalt mixture.