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- Ground penetrating radar (3)
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- Ground penetrating radar (GPR) (2)
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Using ground penetrating radar and time-frequency analysis to characterize construction materials
(2011)
For decades, applications of nondestructive evaluation-civil engineering (NDE-CE) focus on object identifications (such as steel bars, tendon ducts and backwall reflections) in infrastructures. Because of the advantage of efficient visualization of internal structure, utilization of these methods can probably be extended to material characterization (MC) of aging and adversely exposed infrastructures. However, two factors yield a big gap between NDE and MC. First, for the ease of visualization, the primary focus of NDE-signal processing is object identification, which usually alters the originality of the signal. Second, there is lack of relationship and inverse models bridging the NDE-derived and conventional material properties compared to other disciplines of science, such as geophysics. These disadvantages make laboratory and field-scale NDE-MC still a far-reaching holy grail and is possibly the greatest hurdle to be regularly adopted in CE structures. This paper attempts to address this gap from object identification to MC using ground penetrating radar (GPR) as one of the most frequently used NDE-CE methods, and signal processing with joint timefrequency domain (JTFA) analysis. Three examples of material property characterization regarding the individual effects of steel bar corrosion in concrete, hydration and moisture content distribution of construction materials are given.
This paper studies the dielectric dispersion of high frequency radar wave in concrete in early-aged and hardened concrete specimens. Frequency-dependent spectra of phase velocity ν(ω) were measured to deduce the spectra of real part of dielectric permittivity ε'(ω). The dispersion was measured by three high nominal ground penetrating radar frequencies (1.5, 1.6 and 2.6 GHz), experimenting on two steel bars with concrete cover 50 and 100 mm. It was found that ν(ω) and ε'(ω) dispersed at lower frequency, but became stable at high frequency regions, which agrees with the classical GPR plateau. The same frequency components at different nominal antenna frequencies show a close range of ν(ω) and ε'(ω) in concrete of different ages. The results in this paper warrant further investigation of using GPR wave to study material properties.
Building stones are porous media and they can deteriorate through moisture ingress and secondary damage such as crystallization of soluble salts. Not only is this due to the increasing number of flood events in the past years but also structural damages of houses from activity such as leakage or rising moisture (groundwater) are the main causes. The potential benefit of several nondestructive testing methods to assess water damage in building stone has been studied in a field-scale experiment. Three testing walls made of fired clay brick, sandstone, and spongilite were flooded and their drying behavior monitored using infrared thermography, complex resistivity, ground penetrating radar, and ultrasonics. The results were compared to the average moisture content determined by gravimetric weighing of the specimens. Qualitatively, the results of the different nondestructive testing methods matched well. But in terms of quantitative data, some scatter was observed and the results should be viewed with care. Collecting time-consuming calibration data would help to overcome this problem, but especially when dealing with historic building structures, this is not always possible in practice.
A new approach is presented to evaluate corrosion of steel bars in concrete by 1.5- and 2.6-GHz ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and a modified half-cell potential method. Changes in time-lapsed travel times, amplitudes, and peak frequencies that are associated with short-time Fourier transform spectrograms of the bar reflections were continuously measured. The year-long corrosion process of the reinforcement bar rapidly accelerated within a few days by impressing direct current across a pair of embedded reinforcement bars, which served as the anode and cathode. When corrosion started, the travel times, amplitudes, and frequency spectra of the bar reflection changed. The results were analyzed by dividing the material's response into three phases (NaCl contamination, depassivation, and corrosion). The writers attribute the phenomena of the first two phases to the ionic conduction and interfacial polarization effect, described in the low-frequency regime of complex dielectric permittivity outlined in the Maxwell-Wagner effect. The remaining phase corresponds with the appearance of large and multiple interfaces among steel, concrete, corrosion product, and cracks, in addition to the upward movement of the corrosion product to the concrete surface that intercepts wider radar footprints. The findings, based on time lapse measurements, provide a basis to further apply the GPR technique to spatial measurements in laboratory and field studies.
Estimation of ground penetrating radar's wave velocity in materials is a critical step to accurately estimate depth of embedded line objects in concrete structures, and wetness of material. Errors of velocity are defined as the deviations between the velocities obtained in various oblique angles and those obtained in the traverse normal to the object orientation in a common offset antenna setting. In this paper, we quantified and corrected the errors of such estimation. GPR traverses were designed to travel in various oblique angles θ (90°, 75°, 60° and 45°) relative to the steel bars at 5 cover depths (55 mm, 85 mm, 115 mm, 145 mm and 175 mm). GPR wave velocity at any position within the lateral detection range of steel bars was measured with simple trigonometry in a semi-automated in-house program. It was found that reduction of oblique angles (i.e. θ<90°) causes flatter hyperbolic reflections and the associated errors of velocity can be as much as 30% in the case of an oblique angle 45° before correction. Such errors were corrected after re-scaling the horizontal travel distance with a multiplication factor of sin θ.
This paper studies the spatial and temporal spectral absorption of reflector signals of a 1.5 GHz ground penetrating radar (GPR) during a drying process of a brickwall from initial wet to later dry state. The non-stationary GPR signals were processed with short time-Fourier transform (STFT) and wavelet transform (WT) in a novel spatial-timefrequency (STF) domain. Spatial distribution of peak frequency at the direct wave (DW) across the antenna and a backwall reflection was studied to characterize the mechanism of spectral absorption of GPR wave. Results from WT were shown to be more preferred to those from STFT because the WT offers multiple resolutions to cope with both low and high frequency components in GPR wavelets but STFT does not. In addition to the traditional GPR signal interpretation in time-domain and our previous works on time–frequency domain, the analysis method operated in the STF domain provides another possibility of material characterization by GPR in large and field scale.
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) was used to characterize the frequency-dependent dielectric relaxation phenomena in ordinary Portland cement (OPC) hydration in concrete changing from fresh to hardened state. The study was experimented by measuring the changes of GPR A-scan waveforms over a period of 90 days, and processed the waveforms with short-time Fourier transform (STFT) in joint time-frequency analysis (JTFA) domain rather than a conventional time or frequency domain alone. The signals of the direct wave traveled at the concrete surface and the reflected wave from an embedded steel bar were transformed with STFT, in which the changes of peak frequency over ages were tracked. The peak frequencies were found to increase with ages and the patterns were found to match closely with primarily the well-known OPC hydration process and secondarily, the evaporation effect. The close match is contributed to the simultaneous effects converting free to bound water over time, on both conventional OPC hydration and dielectric relaxation mechanisms.
Air voids in concrete like honeycombs are one of the major concerns regarding quality assurance for the construction of infrastructure buildings like bridges or tunnels. This paper shows that voids in reinforced concrete walls or slabs can be detected by two standard ground coupled GPR antennas in transmission mode using a two-side zero-offset profiling configuration like in borehole radar applications. For the detection of voids only the amplitudes of the direct wave in transmission mode are evaluated. Even when the depth of the void can not be detected in this configuration, the major advantage of the zero-offset profiling in transmission mode is a lower interference with the surrounding reinforcement compared to a regular one-side reflection profiling. The capability of the two-side zero-offset profiling is demonstrated on a test specimen with a set of polystyrene balls of two different sizes representing voids like honeycombs in concrete. GPR measurements are realized by an automated scanning system in order to allow for a synchronous movement of the antennas. In transmission mode voids can be detected at greater depths compared to reflection mode, since the travel path of the direct wave is half as long. Another characteristic of the transmission mode is that the direct wave through the air voids is faster and arrives earlier than the direct wave in the surrounding concrete. Hence it can be separated from the strong reflection of the reinforcement. Finally the measurements in transmission mode are less sensitive to the antenna frequency and polarization than in reflection mode.
Muon Tomography of the Interior of a Reinforced Concrete Block: First Experimental Proof of Concept
(2021)
Quality assurance and condition assessment of concrete structures is an important topic world-wide due to the aging infrastructure and increasing traffic demands. Common topics include, but are not limited to, localisation of rebar or tendon ducts, geometrical irregularities, cracks, voids, honeycombing or other flaws. Non-destructive techniques such as ultrasound or radar have found regular, successful practical application but sometimes suffer from limited resolution and accuracy, imaging artefacts or restrictions in detecting certain features. Until the 1980s X-ray transmission was used in case of special demands and showed a much better resolution than other NDT techniques. However, due to safety concerns and cost issues, this method is almost never used anymore. Muon tomography has received much attention recently. Novel detectors for cosmic muons and tomographic imaging algorithms have opened up new fields of application, such as the investigation of freight containers. Muon imaging also has the potential to fill some of the gaps currently existing in concrete NDT. As a first step towards practical use and as a proof of concept we used an existing system to image the interior of a reference reinforced 600 kg concrete block. Even with a yet not optimized setup for this kind of investigation, the muon imaging results are at least of similar quality compared to ultrasonic and radar imaging, potentially even better. The data acquisition takes more time and signals contain more noise, but the images allowed to detect the same important features that are visible in conventional high energy X-ray tomography. In our experiment, we have shown that muon imaging has potential for concrete inspection. The next steps include the development of mobile detectors and optimising acquisition and imaging parameters.