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New possibilities for concrete analysis 4.0 with the Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS)
(2020)
In civil engineering the damage assessment of concrete infrastructures is an important task to monitor and ensure the estimated life-time. The aging of concrete is caused by different damage processes like the chloride induced pitting corrosion of the reinforcement. The penetration depth and the concentration of harmful species are crucial factors in the damage assessment. As a highly cost and time-consuming standard procedure, the analysis of concrete drill cores or drilling by wet-chemistry is widely used. This method provides element concentration to the total mass as aggregates and binder are homogenized. In order to provide a method that is capable to detect the element concentration regarding the cement content only, the laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) will be presented. The LIBS method uses a focused pulsed laser on the sample surface to ablate material. The high-power density and the laser-material interaction causes a laser-induced plasma that emits elemental and molecular line emission due to energy transition of the excited species in the plasma during the cooling phase.
As each element provides element-specific line emission, it is in principle possible to detect any element on the periodic table (spectroscopic fingerprint) with one laser shot. In combination with a translation stage the sample under investigation can be spatially resolved using a scan raster with a resolution up to 100 µm (element mapping). Due to the high spatial resolution, the element distribution and the heterogeneity of the concrete can be evaluated. By using chemometrics the non-relevant aggregates can be excluded from the data set and the element concentration can be quantified and referred to a specific solid phase like the binding matrix (cement) only. In order to analyze transport processes like diffusion and migration the twodimensional element distributions can provide deep insight into the transport through the pore space and local enrichments of elements. As LIBS is a multi-elemental method it is also possible to compare the ingress and transport process of different elements like Cl, Na, K, S, C, and Li simultaneously and evaluate cross-correlations between the different ions. Furthermore, the element mapping allows to visualize the transport along cracks. This work will show the state of the art in terms of hardware and software for an automated LIBS system as well as different application for a concrete analysis 4.0. Focus will be the application of LIBS for a fast concrete analysis.
The review mainly deals with two topics that became important in applications of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) in recent years: the emission of halogen- and rare-earth-containing molecules and selective excitation of molecules by molecular laser-induced fluorescence (MLIF). The first topic is related to the emission of alkaline-earth diatomic halides MX, M = Ca, Mg, Ba, Sr and X = F, Cl, Br, and I and rare-earth element (REE) oxides LaO, YO, and ScO. These molecules form in laser-induced plasma (LIP) soon after its ignition and persist for a long time, emitting broad bands in a visible part of the spectrum. They are best detected after relatively long delay times when emission from interfering plasma species (atoms and ions) has already been quenched. Such behavior of molecular spectra allows of using, for their detection, inexpensive CCD detectors equipped with simple electronic or mechanical shutters and low-resolution spectrometers. A main target for analysis by molecular spectroscopy is halogens; these elements are difficult to detect by atomic spectroscopy because their most intense atomic lines lie in the vacuum UV. Therefore, in many situations, emission from CaF and CaCl may provide a substantially more sensitive detection of F and Cl than emission from elemental F and Cl and their ions. This proved to be important in mining and concrete industries and even Mars exploration. A similar situation is observed for REEs; their detection by atomic spectroscopy sometimes fails even despite the abundance of atomic and ionic REEs' lines in the UV-VIS. For example, in minerals and rocks with low concentrations of REEs, emission from major and minor mineral elements hinders the weak emission from REEs. Many REEs do not form molecules that show strong emission bands in LIP but can still be detected with the aid of LIP. All REEs except La, Y, and Sc exhibit long-lived luminescence in solid matrices that is easily excited by LIP. The luminescence can be detected simultaneously with molecular emission of species in LIP within the same time and spectral window. The second topic is related to the combination of MLIF and LIBS, which is a technique that was proved to be efficient for analysis of isotopic molecules in LIP. For example, the characteristic spectral signals from isotopic molecules containing 10B and 11B are easier to detect with MLIF-LIBS than with laser ablation molecular isotopic spectrometry (LAMIS) because MLIF provides strong resonance excitation of only targeted isotopes. The technique is also very efficient in detection of halogen molecules although it requires an additional tunable laser that makes the experimental setup bulky and more expensive.
The composition of concrete determines its resistance to various degradation mechanisms such as ingress of ions, carbonation or reinforcement corrosion. Knowledge of the composition of the hardened concrete is therefore helpful to assess the remaining service life of an existing structure or evaluate the damage observed during inspections. For example, for most existing concrete structures the type of cement originally used is not known and must therefore be determined afterwards. This paper presents a preliminary study on the application of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to identify the type of cement. For this purpose, ten different types of cement were investigated. For every type, three cement paste prisms were produced: (i) prisms dried, ground and pressed into tablets, (ii) prisms dried and (iii) prisms untreated. LIBS measurements were performed with a diode-pumped low energy laser (1064 nm, 3 mJ, 1.5 ns, 100 Hz) in combination with two compact spectrometers which cover the UV and NIR spectral range. A reduced subset of spectral features was used to build a classification model based on linear discriminant analysis. The results show that the classification of homogenized pressed cement powder samples provides a high accuracy, however, factors such as a different sample matrix and moisture content can affect the accuracy of the classification. The study demonstrates that LIBS is a promising tool to identify the type of cement.
The chemical composition of a weld metal determines the resulting solidification mode of stainless steel and the consequent weld metal quality. In this work tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding of EN grade 1.4435 austenitic stainless steel was monitored using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for the in situ measurement of chemical composition changes. This research aims to prototype a real-time chemical composition analysis system for welding applications and prove the feasibility of such quality control loop. LIBS was used to investigate in situ the monitoring of metal vaporization during TIG welding. We found Mn vapor formation above the weld pool and subsequent condensation of Mn on the weld metal surface using LIBS. Post-weld line scans were conducted by LIBS on various welds produced with different welding currents. Local changes of Ni and Mn were observed at higher welding currents. The results are in good agreement with the literature and proved that LIBS can be used in situ to inspect the TIG welding process.
The effect of particle grain sizes in different cement-based mixtures on the laser-induced plasma evolution is studied using two experimental methods: (i) temporal and spatial evolution of the laser-induced shock wave is investigated using shadowgraphy and two-dimensional plasma imaging, and (ii) temporal and spatial distribution of elements in the plasma is investigated using two-dimensional spectral imaging. This study is motivated by the interest in applying laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for chemical analysis of concrete, and subsequently obtain information related to damage assessment of structures like bridges and parking decks. The distribution of grain sizes is of major interest in civil engineering as for making concrete different aggregate grain sizes defined by a sieving curve (64mm to 0.125 mm) are needed. Aggregates up to a size of 180 μm can be excluded from the data set, therefore only the amount of small aggregates with a grain size below 180 μm must be considered with LIBS. All components of the concrete with a grain size smaller than 0.125mm are related to the flour grain content. Tested samples consisted of dry and hardened cement paste (water-cement ratio w/z=0.5), which served as a reference. Aggregate mixtures were made by adding flour grains (size 40 μm) and silica fume (size 0.1 μm) in different ratios to cement: 10%, 30%, 50% and 60%, all combined to the remaining percentage of dry or hydrated cement. The visualization results show that a dependance in the evolution of the plasma as a function of sample grain size can be detected only in the initial stages of the plasma formation, that is, at the initial 3 μs of the plasma life. Spectral information reveals the elemental distribution of the silicon and calcium in plasma, in both neutral and ionized form. Here also, a significant effect is observed in the first 1 μs of the plasma lifetime.