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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 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.