Research on Characterization of Asphalt Pavement Performance by Acoustic Emission Technology

Under the action of long-term service and external environment, asphalt pavement will have a variety of complex damage and destruction, affecting its service function and life. The biggest advantage of acoustic emission (AE) technology is that it can characterize and analyze the whole process of material damage and failure from the microscopic point of view. Therefore, the characterization and evaluation method of asphalt pavement materials based on the combination of AE technology (micro) and mechanical test method (macro) has attracted the attention of researchers. This paper reviews and summarizes the research status of AE technology in the performance characterization of asphalt pavement, classifies and details the application of AE technology in asphalt mixture and asphalt binder respectively, and puts forward the future research direction and key problems to be solved in this field. In future studies, researchers should pay attention to the generation and propagation mechanism of AE sources in asphalt pavement materials, and establish corresponding simulation methods to explore the AE characteristics inside asphalt pavement. The theoretical relationship between AE parameters and mechanical parameters should be established to characterize the pavement performance of asphalt mixture from different scales. Modern signal processing technology and algorithm should be applied to AE signal analysis and source location, and a variety of non-destructive testing methods should be integrated to evaluate the performance of asphalt pavement. In the field monitoring, filtering and de-noising methods should be adopted to obtain the AE signals that can reflect the pavement damage and fracture.