Reinforced concrete (RC) shear walls are popular structural systems to resist lateral forces like wind and
earthquake. The cracking behavior of these critical structural elements is crucial due to its harmful effects on
structural performance such as serviceability and durability requirements. A technique that shows promise for
monitoring RC structures is acoustic emission (AE). This paper presents an experimental investigation of fracture
processes of two large-scale RC shear using AE parameters. In addition, a novel cluster analysis based on the
k-means is presented to automatically classify the two fundamental cracks modes (i.e., tensile and shear).
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