A PRELIMINARY FEASIBILITY ANALYSIS ABOUT THE STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING OF RAILWAY CONCRETE SLEEPERS BY ACOUSTIC EMISSION AND DIGITAL IMAGE CORRELATION

Railway concrete sleepers are made out of steel reinforced concrete and are a safety critical component of the railway track. Different kinds of failure are observed during service and this requires a maintenance plan involving non-destructive testing. Nevertheless, shifting from a non-destructive approach to structural health monitoring has shown relevant opportunities to increase in-service reliability and to decrease the costs of maintenance. From this point of view, the present paper describes a preliminary feasibility analysis about the application of acoustic emission for detection of cracks in prestressed concrete sleepers. For the purpose of assessment, obtained results are compared with other methods, such as digital image correlation and visual testing. Encouraging results indicate the possibility to carry out more validating tests in order to get the engineering of a suitably cheap monitoring system for in-service applications.