Acoustic emission (AE) technology is extensively acknowledged as a promising structural health monitoring (SHM) approach; meanwhile, AE monitoring has long been criticised for a lack of quantitative results. This work revealed a strong correlation between the shear stress distribution and the resulting AE distribution, enabling accurate and real‐time quantification of the shear stress states in concrete beams using only AE measurements. This paper started by introducing the AE phenomenon and the theoretical distribution of the shear stresses on a beam cross section, which revealed that the distributions of the stresses and the resulting emissions inherently correlate to each other. Twelve reinforced concrete beams were then tested, deploying devices including an AE system. The results showed that the AE source intensity distribution strongly correlated with that of the shear stresses in a beam segment when the beam was in both the working stage and the failure phase and that the matching degree of these two distribution curves varied from 79.20% to 94.12%. The correlation revealed in the paper will boost a wide range of significant AE‐based scientific research and engineering applications, including SHM and non‐destructive testing.

中文翻译：

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混凝土梁的剪应力分布与声发射变化之间的关系

声发射（AE）技术被广泛认为是一种有前途的结构健康监测（SHM）方法。同时，由于缺乏定量结果，长期以来人们一直批评AE监测。这项工作揭示了剪切应力分布与所得AE分布之间的强相关性，仅使用AE测量就可以对混凝土梁中的剪切应力状态进行准确，实时的量化。本文首先介绍了AE现象和梁截面上的剪应力的理论分布，这揭示了应力的分布与所产生的辐射固有地相互关联。然后测试了十二根钢筋混凝土梁，部署了包括AE系统在内的设备。结果表明，当梁处于工作阶段和破坏阶段时，AE源的强度分布与梁段中的切应力密切相关，并且这两个分布曲线的匹配度从79.20％变化到94.12。 ％。本文揭示的相关性将促进基于AE的大量重要科学研究和工程应用，包括SHM和无损检测。