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The structural safety, durability and performance of the infrastructure is of primary interest in every country. An efficient system for early and regular structural assessment as well as for quality assurance during and after the construction of new structures and of reconstruction processes is urgently required. At BAM, NDT methods to be applied in civil engineering are developed and their application improved. From the experience of on-site assessments, quality assurance systems and methodologies for regular inspections are elaborated. This work is mainly performed in the frame of externally funded research projects.
Coda wave interferometry is a recent analysis method now widely used in seismology. It uses the increased sensitivity of multiply scattered elastic waves with long travel-times for monitoring weak changes in a medium. While its application for structural monitoring has been shown to work under laboratory conditions, the usability on a real structure with known material changes had yet to be proven. This article presents experiments on a concrete bridge during construction. The results show that small velocity perturbations induced by a changing stress state in the structure can be determined even under adverse conditions. Theoretical estimations based on the stress calculations by the structural engineers are in good agreement with the measured velocity variations.
Ultrasonic echo testing is a more and more frequently used technique in civil engineering to investigate concrete building elements, to measure thickness as well as to locate and characterise built-in components or inhomogeneities. Currently the Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (SAFT), which is closely related to Kirchhoff migration, is used in most cases for imaging. However, this method is known to have difficulties to image steeply dipping interfaces as well as lower boundaries of tubes, voids or similar objects. We have transferred a processing technique from geophysics, the Reverse Time Migration (RTM) method, to improve the imaging of complicated geometries. By using the information from wide angle reflections as well as from multiple events there are fewer limitations compared to SAFT. As a drawback the required computing power is significantly higher compared to the techniques currently used. Synthetic experiments have been performed on polyamide and concrete specimens to show the improvements compared to SAFT. We have been able to image vertical interfaces of step-like structures as well as the lower boundaries of circular objects. It has been shown that RTM is a step forward for ultrasonic testing in civil engineering.
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and infrared (IR) thermography techniques have been used in many civil engineering applications for the structural visualization and defect detection.
However, validation tests of the methods performance for the defection of defects in the nearsurface region with respect to the defects different material and depth below the surface are lacking. To overcome this, we performed GPR and IR thermography tests where the different material properties, shape and depth of defects were studied on concrete and the evaluation of seismic related damage propagation was assessed on stone masonry walls. The results showed that IR thermography, though being greatly affected by the presence of water in the specimen, outperformed GPR in the detection of defects very close to the surface. However, already at the depth of 3 cm and further up till almost 7.5 cm, the performance of GPR resembles the one of IR thermography for the detection of polystyrene (air) voids. On the plastered masonry walls, IR thermography could detect an air gap resulting from plaster delamination as small as 2 mm.
Moreover, structural cracking resulting from the induced lateral load could be detected at an early stage.
Ultrasonic methods are valuable tools for quality assessment and structural imaging of concrete. In such applications, accurate and reliable determination of ultrasonic wave velocities is essential, as they are affected by various experimental and environmental factors. In this research coda wave interferometry (CWI) was used to determine the influence of temperature (0 to 50 °C) on ultrasonic wave velocity in concrete samples. A resolution of better than 10-4 was achieved in the measurement of relative velocity changes. Reversibility and repeatability as well as the influence of moisture were taken into account. In addition the influence of sensor (transmitter and receiver) positioning errors on the results of the interferometric algorithm was evaluated as well as the benefit of newly developed, permanently embedded sensors. The presented results can be used to evaluate and refine data from ultrasonic monitoring systems.
The capabilities of non-destructive testing (NDT) methods for defect detection in civil engineering are characterized by their different penetration depth, resolution and sensitivity to material properties. Therefore, in many cases multi-sensor NDT has to be performed, producing large data sets that require an efficient data evaluation framework. In this work an image fusion methodology is proposed based on unsupervised clustering methods. Their performance is evaluated on ground penetrating radar and infrared thermography data from laboratory concrete specimens with different simulated near-surface defects. It is shown that clustering could effectively partition the data for further feature level-based data fusion by improving the detectability of defects simulating delamination, voids and localized water. A comparison with supervised symbol level fusion shows that clustering-based fusion outperforms this, especially in situations with very limited knowledge about the material properties and depths of the defects. Additionally, clustering is successfully applied in a case study where a multi-sensor NDT data set was automatically collected by a self-navigating mobile robot system.
Utilization of coherent phase information in complex wave fields forms the basis of interferometric time series analysis. The concept is known since decades, but until about 15 years ago there have been no practical implementations. Meanwhile seismic interferometry is used in a wide range from investigations of the earth’s deep crust to engineering applications. Focused on monitoring and imaging the MIIC (Monitoring and Imaging based on Interferometric Concepts) project as part of the German GeoTechnologien program has contributed to this development. Special attention was given to the transfer of methodology to different length scales that range from centimeters, in laboratory applications, over geotechnical scales to even kilometers in seismological applications. General purpose methods and open source software was developed, which can be used on all scales. The core of the MIIC software is a Python library organized in different modules for various processing tasks. A graphical user interface facilitates the creation of processing routines by visualizing connections and dependencies of variables and by checking the consistency of data types. Example applications have included carbon sequestration, salt mine and railroad embankment monitoring as well as imaging changes in concrete constructions.