Acoustic Emission Analysis (AEA) is a non-destructive method that has been utilized to detect damage mechanisms in different applications. The use of this technique in materials failure diagnosis has increased over the last years. In the case of concrete structures, it is based on detection of the released energy due to the occurrence of crack events. Sensing this released energy enable to detect cracks that develop inside concrete structures with some reliability as was studied in [1].

Due to the complexity of damage mechanism of concrete, the wave propagation characteristics in these structures have usually a very complicated pattern. Feng and Yi [2] have presented a method enabling to perform the analysis of attenuation characteristics of the amplitude in time domain and accumulation characteristics of the marginal spectrum in frequency domain. They have used the Hilbert-Huang transform to study quantitatively the propagation characteristics of acoustic emission wave in reinforced concrete structures. According to this study, the selection of suitable signal frequency during the experimental process has an important significance for obtaining the attenuation coefficient of concrete materials in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

In this work, finite element modelling of the propagation of acoustic emission wave is performed under Abaqus software package. The attenuation of the wave is determined as function of the frequency and the flight distance.

In order to identify the damage modes of the concrete structure, we've extracted the peak frequency characteristics of the acoustic emission analysis signals. It was found that this method can investigate quantitatively the acoustic emission wave propagation characteristic in concrete structures.