4.7 Article

Air-coupled ultrasonic diffuse-wave techniques to evaluate distributed cracking damage in concrete

Journal

ULTRASONICS
Volume 125, Issue -, Pages -

Publisher

ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.ultras.2022.106800

Keywords

Diffuse wave; Air-coupled ultrasound; Non-destructive evaluation; Distributed cracking damage; Diffusivity; Dissipation

Funding

  1. Basic Research Lab Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea - Ministry of Science and ICT [NRF-2021R1A4A1030867]
  2. Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport of the Republic of Korea [19SCIP-B103706-05]
  3. Construction Technology Research Program - Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport of the Republic of Korea [19SCIP-B103706-05]

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This study investigates the suitability of applying air-coupled ultrasonic diffuse-wave techniques to concrete structures for evaluating micro-cracking damage. The results show that the air-coupled method provides similar reliability to the full-contact method, while allowing faster and more flexible data collection.
In this study, we investigated the suitability of applying air-coupled ultrasonic diffuse-wave techniques to concrete structures for the evaluation of arbitrarily distributed micro-cracking damage. Air-coupled test results were compared with those obtained using a conventional full-contact measurement system. Three different microcracking damage levels were simulated by embedding varying amounts of low-stiffness polypropylene fibers in concrete samples. Two principal diffuse-wave parameters, diffusivity and dissipation, were determined using air-coupled and full-contact test configurations. Wave frequencies of 300-600 kHz were employed, which set up significant ultrasonic scattering owing to the heterogeneous characteristics of concrete components (e.g., aggregates, micro-cracks expressed by fibers, and pores). In addition, the sensitivities of diffusivity and dissipation to the number of measurement locations were examined. The results demonstrated that the air-coupled method can provide an equivalent reliability to the full-contact method, allowing a much faster and flexible data collection. The spatial averaging of 20 arbitrarily selected data (measured at different locations) yielded sufficiently accurate diffuse-wave parameters, showing less than a 5 % difference from the average of 32 spatially different data.

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