8.2 Zerstörungsfreie Prüfmethoden für das Bauwesen
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- Beitrag zu einem Sammelband (3) (entfernen)
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- Pile integrity testing (2)
- Building materials (1)
- Embedded humidity sensors (1)
- Foundation reuse (1)
- L-curve (1)
- Material moisture (1)
- Moisture monitoring (1)
- NDT (1)
- Parallel seismic (1)
- Tikhonov regularization (1)
Organisationseinheit der BAM
- 8 Zerstörungsfreie Prüfung (3) (entfernen)
Subfloors are layered structures, consisting largely of porous building materials, such as screed. They are often suffering damage from tap water leakage, which is a typical problem in buildings, and which has largely contributed to repair costs of almost 3 billion Euro in 2018 alone in Germany. In this context, especially mould plays a role, which is both destroying the structure and posing severe health risks.
To determine the damaging effects of moisture, it is necessary to know the respective processes occurring in building materials, especially to quantify the amount of moisture and its progress in the material. In this study, humidity sensors are used to derive the material moisture experimentally.
Capacitive sensors recording the relative humidity are embedded into the screed and in the insulation materials such as expanded polystyrene, extruded polystyrene, perlite and glass wool. For the application in screed, the sensors need to be shielded against the aggressive alkaline materials. To ensure an appropriate exchange with the environment, a permeable membrane is requested. Different membrane materials have been investigated regarding their robustness and their permeability.
In the first experimental setup, two humidity sensor arrays with seven individual sensors are embedded in homogeneous screed samples. The measured corresponding relative humidity of the screed is converted to the material moisture based on the approach of Hillerborg. In a second experimental setup, a layered structure of a complete subfloor is built in a box of 0.8 m times 0.8 m. The humidity sensors are positioned in the different insulation materials of various thicknesses. By adding water, leakage damage is simulated and its progress and effect is investigated experimentally.
The investigations point at the question if the observed moisture is able to generate damage such as mould. The moisture and corresponding humidity values are discussed. It will be shown that this low-cost hygrometric approach can be used easily for moisture monitoring of screed and insulation materials as well
The reuse of existing foundations is considered in various construction Projects to save time and costs while avoiding unnecessary interference with other underground objects. Because the design and as-built drawings might not be complete and questions may arise regarding the condition of the foundations, a detailed investigation is a prerequisite for the planning process in most cases. Nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques are a core part of this endeavor.
The processes and procedure for foundation reuse planning are not yet standardized, and the possibilities and limitations of NDT methods are not known to many planners and stakeholders. The German research Project REFUND (2014–2016) has developed charts for the planning and Investigation process that consider available standards and the current state of the art in NDT.
These charts are separately available for single and strip, slab, and pile foundations. Available NDT methods have been compiled and evaluated for specific tasks at these foundation types, including their respective limitations.
The procedures have been successfully tested in two real-world projects. The results from these projects enable planners to improve the reliability of the process while potentially saving significant resources. This paper discusses the procedures for pile foundations and demonstrates the use of various NDT methods in a project on the reuse of electrical tower foundations.
Concrete piles are used as a foundation when the load capacity of the soil is insufficient or when the sustainable soil is found at a higher depth. Among other impact factors, the load capacity depends on the pile’s integrity and length.
Therefore, verifying these parameters using adequate methods is recommended. The most common procedure is the low-strain integrity test using the hammer impact method. Developed and established in the 1970s, this method uses stress waves induced by a hammer impact at the pile head and its reflections at impedance changes (length, defects, geometry changes) to estimate the length and defect locations. Although this method is widely used due to its low cost and fast conduction in situ, one disadvantage is its inability to classify the exact type of defect, i.e., crack, change in diameter, or concrete quality. Furthermore, very long and slender piles are difficult to test and small defects cannot be detected. In addition, it is necessary for the test engineer to hold a high level of experience and expertise in this field. The European Union–funded PileInspect project (2013–2016) aimed to compensate for these disadvantages by using a low-cost shaker as the excitation source and sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms for damage detection (higher-order spectra method). Because this technology lacks the capacity to localize damages and verify the pile length, an additional impulse response (IR) measurement technique was developed using vibrational excitation and regularized deconvolution to extract the depth information from the data in a similar manner as the hammer method.
Simulations and subsequent experiments conducted at a test facility on 90-cm-diameter bored piles 11 m in length and containing cracks at approximately 4 m below the pile head confirmed the capacity to determine the pile length.
Damage diagnosis and localization, however, are more difficult than for the hammer method. Although the damaged piles could be distinguished from the intact piles, in a blind test, this method might lead to misinterpretations caused by perturbations arising from the deconvolution process. The results also indicated that the low-cost shaker used for these measurements might be inappropriate for
the transferal of sufficient energy. Although the IR method cannot compensate for the disadvantages of the hammer method by itself, it may enable the possibility of using long and fully controllable and repeatable signals (chirp, synthetic impacts, even noise, etc.) for pile integrity testing in the future.