In civil engineering, materials subjected to stress or strain states a quantitative evaluation of damage is of great importance due to the critical character of this phenomena, which at certain point suddenly turns into catastrophic failure.An effective damage assessment criterion is represented by the statistical analysis of the Acoustic Emission (AE) amplitude distribution signals that emerges from the growing micro-cracks.The amplitudes of such signals are distributed according to the Gutenberg-Ritcher (GR) law and characterized through the b-value which systematically decreases with damage growth.Carpinteri et al (2012)[1] verified experimentally the relation between this b value and the fractal dimension where the damage happened during the tests.A version of 3D lattice model, known as truss-like Discrete Element Method (DEM) (Riera 1984 [2]) is here utilized.This Method is based on the representation of a solid by means of a regular 3D arrangement of elements able to carry only axial loads.The discrete elements representation of the orthotropic continuum was adopted to solve structural dynamics problems by means of explicit direct numerical integration of the equations of motion, assuming the mass lumped at the nodes.Each node has three degrees of freedom, corresponding to the nodal displacements in the three orthogonal coordinate directions.The softening law for quasi fragile materials proposed by Hilleborg (1976) [3] was adopted to handle fragile fracture by means of the triangular constitutive relationship, which allows accounting for the irreversible effects of crack nucleation and propagation.In the present work some specimens are tested up to the failure and its results are compared with numerical results obtained by DEM.The results are similar in terms of typical AE parameters, such as AE count rate, cumulative counts, and b-value variations.Using the lattice model, the relationship between the AE signal magnitude and the energy released in each localized rupture has also been analyzed.The obtained results are compatible with the GR energy-magnitude relation.Finally, the numerical results have been analyzed in terms of AE signal frequency.In Fig 1 we present the numerical results for a uniaxiai compression test in terms of the final configuration, load vs time and the distribution of the AE magnitudes during the simulation.