Validation of AE tomography based on model tests of soil specimen with heterogeneous elastic wave velocity distribution

In order to investigate the progressive failure of soil-structures, non-destructive inspections have been applied in recent. Use of Acoustic Emission (AE), the elastic wave which is generated by the occurrence of cracks, is attractive in this field to detail the progressive failure if the measurement is conducted with sufficiently small time interval. Although this technique potentially detects the cracks clearly, conventional methods of AE source localization consider that elastic wave velocity distribution is homogenous, and there are the limitations of its application due to the diffraction and the refraction of elastic wave if the heterogeneity of the elastic wave velocity distribution is not negligible. In this study, AE-Tomography (AET), which performs the identification elastic wave velocity distribution and the localization of AE sources with consideration of the diffraction and the refraction of elastic wave, is validated about the performance of the identification of the elastic wave velocity distribution and the AE sources localizations on numerical tests and model tests. Artificial AE events are generated in the soil specimen that have some parts of different relative density and validation of AET is conducted by using the arrival times of the artificial AE. According to the results of the validation, it is suggested that AET identifies elastic wave velocity distributions and AE source locations adequately on the heterogeneous elastic wave velocity distributions.