TY - JOUR A1 - Küttenbaum, Stefan A1 - Braml, T. A1 - Taffe, A. A1 - Keßler, S. A1 - Maack, Stefan T1 - Reliability assessment of existing structures using results of nondestructive testing N2 - Making optimal decisions about the reliability of existing structures requires that the information used in assessment adequately represents the properties and the condition of the structures. The knowledge gap regarding a structure to be assessed can be successively filled by individually purposeful observations on site. This paper gives an overview of an approach for utilizing nondestructively gathered measurement results in reliability assessment of existing structures. An essential part of measurement-based stochastic modeling of basic variables is the calculation of measurement uncertainties, which serves to establish confidence in measurement, to ensure the comparability of unambiguously expressed measurement results, and to quantify the quality of the measured information. Regarding the current discourse on how to treat information collected on-site in the context of assessment, the authors recommend that measurement uncertainty becomes an uncertainty component mandatorily to be represented in measurement-based stochastic models. The main steps of the proposed concept are presented, and the advantages of its application are emphasized by means of a prestressed concrete bridge as case study. The bridge is assessed regarding the serviceability limit state decompression using ultrasonic and radar data measured at the structure. KW - Bridge KW - Measurement uncertainty KW - Prestressed concrete KW - Stochastic modeling KW - Probabilistic methods PY - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-529927 DO - https://doi.org/10.1002/suco.202100226 SN - 1751-7648 VL - 22 IS - 5 SP - 2895 EP - 2915 PB - John Wiley & Sons Ltd CY - Oxford AN - OPUS4-52992 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bühling, Benjamin A1 - Maack, Stefan A1 - Schönsee, Eric A1 - Schweitzer, Thorge A1 - Strangfeld, Christoph T1 - Acoustic and flow data of fluidic and piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers N2 - This data article presents characteristic acoustic and flow data of a fluidic ultrasonic transducer as well as acoustic data of a commercial piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer used in non-destructive testing for civil engineering. The flow data has been acquired using hot-wire anemometry and a Pitot tube. The three-dimensional acoustic data of both devices has been acquired using a calibrated microphone. The distribution of characteristic acoustic properties of both transducers are extracted and given in addition to the raw data. The data presented in the article will be a valuable source for reference and validation, both for developing fluidic and alternate ultrasound generation technologies. Furthermore, they will give additional insight into the acoustic-flow interaction phenomena of high speed switching devices. This article is accompanying the paper Experimental Analysis of the Acoustic Field of an Ultrasonic Pulse Induced by a Fluidic Switch (Bühling et al., 2021) published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, where the data is interpreted in detail and the rationale for characteristic sound properties of the fluidic transducer are given. KW - Ultrasound KW - Non-destructive testing KW - Air-coupled ultrasound KW - Fluidics KW - Acoustic-flow interaction KW - Piezoelectric transducer PY - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-531308 DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2021.107280 VL - 38 SP - 1 EP - 8 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam AN - OPUS4-53130 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bühling, Benjamin A1 - Strangfeld, Christoph A1 - Maack, Stefan A1 - Schweitzer, T. T1 - Experimental analysis of the acoustic field of an ultrasonic pulse induced by a fluidic switch N2 - Ultrasonic inspection is a common tool for non-destructive testing in civil engineering (NDT-CE). Currently, transducers are coupled directly to the specimen surface, which makes the inspection time-consuming. Air-coupled ultrasound (ACU) transducers are more time-efficient but need a high pressure amplitude as the impedance mismatch between the air and the concrete is high and large penetration depth is needed for the inspection. Current approaches aim at eliminating the impedance mismatch between the transducer and the air to gain amplitude; however, they hardly fulfill the NDT-CE requirements. In this study, an alternative approach for ultrasound generation is presented: the signal is generated by a fluidic switch that rapidly injects a mass flow into the ambience. The acoustic field, the flow field, and their interaction are investigated. It is shown that the signal has dominant frequencies in the range of 35–60 kHz, and the amplitude is comparable to that of a commercial ACU transducer. KW - Air-coupled ultrasound KW - Non-destructive testing KW - Ultrasonic transducer KW - Acoustic-flow interaction PY - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-523862 DO - https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0003937 VL - 149 IS - 4 SP - 2150 EP - 2158 AN - OPUS4-52386 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Küttenbaum, Stefan A1 - Feistkorn, S. A1 - Braml, T. A1 - Taffe, A. A1 - Maack, Stefan ED - Rizzo, P. ED - Milazzo, A. T1 - Methods to Quantify the Utility of NDT in Bridge Reassessment N2 - The purpose of this contribution is to introduce and to apply the developed approach of incorporating non-destructively gathered measurement results (instead of deterministic information and assumptions) into a reassessment model of a typical prestressed concrete road bridge and to outline the advantages. An essential part is the quality evaluation of the non-destructively measured information, that deals primarily with two questions. Could the object or parameter to be obtained reliably detected and if, how accurate are the inspection results achieved? Therefore, the importance of the combination of a probability of detection (POD)-approach and measurement uncertainty calculations is emphasized. With regard to the introduced case-study it is shown, for which structure parameters an assumption deviating from the actual (and measurable) situation has a particularly strong (and possibly arithmetically unfavorable) influence on the structural reliability. Measurements on such parameters are particularly beneficial for a reliable and robust reassessment. In conclusion, the individual reassessment results without consideration and with consideration of evaluated non-destructive inspection results are compared. KW - Non-destructive testing (NDT) KW - Structural safety KW - Concrete bridges KW - Measurement uncertainty KW - Probability of detection (POD) PY - 2021 SN - 978-3-030-64593-9 DO - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64594-6_40 SN - 2366-2557 VL - 127 SP - 403 EP - 413 PB - Springer Nature Switzerland CY - Cham, Switzerland AN - OPUS4-52009 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CONF A1 - Bühling, Benjamin A1 - Schweitzer, T. A1 - Maack, Stefan A1 - Strangfeld, Christoph T1 - Influence of operating conditions on the fluidic ultrasonic transducer signal N2 - While contact and immersion ultrasonic testing are established methods in non-destructive testing (NDT), generating high power air-coupled ultrasound remains a challenging task. Solutions often involve setups that are restricted to lab environments. When field measurements are required, such as in NDT for civil engineering, a handy, robust and safe transducer is needed. For this purpose, an ultrasonic transducer based on a fluidic switch has been developed. A sonic air flow inside the device is switched rapidly so that an ultrasonic signal is generated. Both theory and previous flow simulations suggest that the control flow pressure ramp has only little influence on the switching time of the device. This publication gives an overview over the operating principle of the fluidic ultrasonic transducer and investigates the influence of control tube length and pulsing repetition rate on the ultrasonic pressure amplitude. High repetition rates are found to reduce the signal amplitude, whereas long tubing has only little negative influence on the amplitude while improving signal quality. T2 - 47. Jahrestagung für Akustik (DAGA 2021) CY - Vienna, Austria DA - 15.08.2021 KW - Ultrasound KW - Non-destructive testing KW - Fluidic devices PY - 2021 UR - https://pub.dega-akustik.de/DAGA_2021 SN - 978-3-939296-18-8 SP - 48 EP - 51 CY - Berlin, Germany AN - OPUS4-53493 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CONF A1 - Maack, Stefan T1 - Testing to reasses - Corrosion activity assessment based on NDT using a prestressed concrete bridge as case study N2 - Corrosion of concrete reinforcement is one of the major damage mechanisms affecting both the load-bearing capacity and the serviceability of reinforced concrete structures significantly. The challenge of detecting corrosion is that the corrosion process in its various forms is not immediately visible, especially in the corrosion initiation phase inside the concrete. When externally discernible damages are observed during visual inspections on the structure, the extent of the damage inside the concrete is often already significant. Corrosion caused by carbonation often leads to severe discoloration of the surface or even large-area spalling of the concrete cover. In contrast, chloride-induced corrosion is usually difficult to observe visually, but can cause much more serious damage in less time. The effect occurs locally and can lead to weakening of the cross-section of the reinforcement. This, in turn, can cause sudden structural collapses without prior notice. Therefore, it is important to investigate whether there is protection against corrosion of the reinforcement in the concrete and to detect active corrosion in the structure at an early stage. In the meanwhile, various non-destructive and minimally invasive testing methods are available to evaluate the resistance to penetration of corrosion-promoting pollutants and to detect active corrosion. In this paper, a bridge crossing the river Regen (Germany) is used as a case-study to demonstrate how the information obtained applying different testing methods can be combined and evaluated in the context of structural reassessments. Both the results of the permeability testing (Torrent tester) and the electrical resistance measurement (Wenner probe) are considered, as well as active corrosion areas are localized using the half-cell potential mapping combined with the concrete cover measurement with the eddy current method and ground penetrating radar (GPR). The results are evaluated using drill cores and in addition laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) was applied to obtain information about possible ion transport in the concrete. T2 - EUROSTRUCT 2021 - 1st Conference of the European Association on Quality Control of Bridges and Structures - EUROSTRUCT CY - Padova, Italy DA - 30.08.2021 KW - Nondestructive testing KW - Corrosion KW - Bridge KW - Durability assessment KW - Civil engineering PY - 2021 AN - OPUS4-53222 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bühling, Benjamin A1 - Maack, Stefan A1 - Schweitzer, T. A1 - Strangfeld, Christoph T1 - Enhancing the spectral signatures of ultrasonic fluidic transducer pulses for improved time-of-flight measurements N2 - Air-coupled ultrasonic (ACU) testing has proven to be a valuable method for increasing the speed in non-destructive ultrasonic testing and the investigation of sensitive specimens. A major obstacle to implementing ACU methods is the significant signal power loss at the air–specimen and transducer–air interfaces. The loss between transducer and air can be eliminated by using recently developed fluidic transducers. These transducers use pressurized air and a natural flow instability to generate high sound power signals. Due to this self-excited flow instability, the individual pulses are dissimilar in length, amplitude, and phase. These amplitude and angle modulated pulses offer the great opportunity to further increase the signal-to-noise ratio with pulse compression methods. In practice, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) setups reduce the time required to scan the specimen surface, but demand high pulse discriminability. By applying envelope removal techniques to the individual pulses, the pulse discriminability is increased allowing only the remaining phase information to be targeted for analysis. Finally, semi-synthetic experiments are presented to verify the applicability of the envelope removal method and highlight the suitability of the fluidic transducer for MIMO setups. KW - Air-coupled ultrasound KW - Fluidics KW - Signal processing KW - Pulse compression KW - MIMO KW - Hilbert transform PY - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-537853 DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ultras.2021.106612 SN - 0041-624X VL - 119 SP - 1 EP - 12 PB - Elsevier B.V. CY - Amsterdam, Netherlands AN - OPUS4-53785 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bühling, Benjamin A1 - Küttenbaum, Stefan A1 - Maack, Stefan A1 - Strangfeld, Christoph T1 - Development of an Accurate and Robust Air-Coupled Ultrasonic Time-of-Flight Measurement Technique N2 - Ultrasonic time-of-flight (ToF) measurements enable the non-destructive characterization of material parameters as well as the reconstruction of scatterers inside a specimen. The time-consuming and potentially damaging procedure of applying a liquid couplant between specimen and transducer can be avoided by using air-coupled ultrasound. However, to obtain accurate ToF results, the waveform and travel time of the acoustic signal through the air, which are influenced by the ambient conditions, need to be considered. The placement of microphones as signal receivers is restricted to locations where they do not affect the sound field. This study presents a novel method for in-air ranging and ToF determination that is non-invasive and robust to changing ambient conditions or waveform variations. The in-air travel time was determined by utilizing the azimuthal directivity of a laser Doppler vibrometer operated in refracto-vibrometry (RV) mode. The time of entry of the acoustic signal was determined using the autocorrelation of the RV signal. The same signal was further used as a reference for determining the ToF through the specimen in transmission mode via cross-correlation. The derived signal processing procedure was verified in experiments on a polyamide specimen. Here, a ranging accuracy of <0.1 mm and a transmission ToF accuracy of 0.3μs were achieved. Thus, the proposed method enables fast and accurate non-invasive ToF measurements that do not require knowledge about transducer characteristics or ambient conditions. KW - Air-coupled ultrasound KW - Laser Doppler vibrometer KW - Refracto-vibrometry KW - Acousto-optic effect KW - Time-of-flight measurements KW - In-air ranging KW - Non-destructive testing PY - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-544711 DO - https://doi.org/10.3390/s22062135 VL - 22 IS - 6 SP - 1 EP - 17 PB - MDPI CY - Basel, Switzerland AN - OPUS4-54471 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CONF A1 - Bühling, Benjamin A1 - Maack, Stefan A1 - Strangfeld, Christoph T1 - OsciCheck - A Novel Fluidic Transducer for Air-Coupled Ultrasonic Measurements N2 - Ultrasonic measurement technology has become indispensable in NDT-CE. Air-coupled ultrasonic (ACU) measurement techniques promise to reduce measurement time. However, the signal quality suffers from large specific impedance mismatch at the transducer-air and air-specimen interface. Additionally, large pressure amplitudes are necessary for the penetration depth required in NDT-CE applications. To address the specific requirements of ultrasonic testing in NDT-CE, a robust ACU transducer was developed, that generates ultrasound by quickly switching a pressurized air flow. The simple design of the fluidic transducer makes the device maintenance free and resilient against harsh environmental conditions. Since the signal is generated by aeroacoustics, there is no specific impedance mismatch between the transducer and the surrounding air. The ultrasonic signal exhibits frequencies in the 30-60 kHz range and is therefore well suited to penetrate heterogenous materials such as concrete. This contribution gives an introduction in the working principle and signal characteristics of the fluidic transducer. Its applicability to measurements in concrete is verified. A detailed outlook is given to discuss the future potential of fluidic ultrasonic actuators. T2 - NDT-CE 2022 CY - Zurich, Switzerland DA - 16.08.2022 KW - Air-coupled ultrasound KW - Nondestructive testing KW - Fluidics KW - Bistable amplifier KW - Aeroacoustics PY - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-555271 UR - https://www.ndt.net/search/docs.php3?id=27319 VL - 2022/09 SP - 1 EP - 9 PB - NDT.net CY - Bad Breisig AN - OPUS4-55527 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Küttenbaum, Stefan A1 - Maack, Stefan A1 - Taffe, A. A1 - Braml, T. ED - Sykora, M. ED - Lenner, R. ED - de Koker, N. T1 - On the Treatment of Measurement Uncertainty in Stochastic Modeling of Basic Variables N2 - The acquisition and appropriate processing of relevant information about the considered system remains a major challenge in assessment of existing structures. Both the values and the validity of computed results such as failure probabilities essentially depend on the quantity and quality of the incorporated knowledge. One source of information are onsite measurements of structural or material characteristics to be modeled as basic variables in reliability assessment. The explicit use of (quantitative) measurement results in assessment requires the quantification of the quality of the measured information, i.e., the uncertainty associated with the information acquisition and processing. This uncertainty can be referred to as measurement uncertainty. Another crucial aspect is to ensure the comparability of the measurement results.This contribution attempts to outline the necessity and the advantages of measurement uncertainty calculations in modeling of measurement data-based random variables to be included in reliability assessment. It is shown, how measured data representing time-invariant characteristics, in this case non-destructively measured inner geometrical dimensions, can be transferred into measurement results that are both comparable and quality-evaluated. The calculations are based on the rules provided in the guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement (GUM). The GUM-framework is internationally accepted in metrology and can serve as starting point for the appropriate processing of measured data to be used in assessment. In conclusion, the effects of incorporating the non-destructively measured data into reliability analysis are presented using a prestressed concrete bridge as case-study. T2 - International Probabilistic Workshop 2022 (IPW2022) CY - Stellenbosch, South Africa DA - 09.09.2022 KW - Reliability KW - Assessment KW - Existing structures KW - Measurement uncertainty PY - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-556580 DO - https://doi.org/10.14311/APP.2022.36.0109 SN - 2336-5382 VL - 36 SP - 109 EP - 118 PB - Czech Technical University CY - Prague AN - OPUS4-55658 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -