Observation of internal cracking in concrete by virtual reality modeling of acoustic emission moment tensor

Acoustic emission (AE) moment tensor analysis can give kinematics information that are locations, surface direction of micro-cracks and cracking motions directions of AE sources in material from stored data sets of AE waveforms. AE-SiGMA Analysis is an efficient solution of AE moment tensor analysis for investigation of internal cracking and fracture mechanism. However, solutions by AE moment tensor analysis are expressing numerically. When these results were shown on the planes (2D visualization), users found difficulty sometimes in the interpretation of the cracking motions and orientations. Nowadays, information technologies and the Internet environment are growing up, and AE-SiGMA Analysis has been improved to ease to use with the aid of the information technology solution. Representation of micro crack locations and directions by 3D visualization using Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is a remarkable technique on this improvement. As the result, these results can be put on Web3D publishing and browsed by usual web browsers, Microsoft(R) Internet Explorer or Netscape(R) Navigator. In this paper, representations of cracking by the virtual reality modeling were attempted. In addition, this method provides the 3D cracking monitoring in case of bending test of reinforced concrete beam and model experiment of re-bar corrosion.