Inspection of Concrete-Metal Rod Interface Using Guided Waves

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Won-Bae Na ◽  
Tribikram Kundu ◽  
Mohammad R. Ehsani

Abstract The feasibility of detecting interface degradation and separation of steel rebars in concrete beams using Lamb waves is investigated in this paper. It is shown that Lamb waves can easily detect these defects. A special coupler between the steel rebar and ultrasonic transducers has been used to launch non-axisymmetric guided waves in the steel rebar. This investigation shows that the Lamb wave inspection technique is an efficient and effective tool for health monitoring of reinforced concrete structures because the Lamb wave can propagate a long distance along the reinforcing steel bars embedded in concrete as the guided wave and is sensitive to the interface debonding between the steel rebar and concrete.

Author(s):  
Tri Miller ◽  
Christopher J. Hauser ◽  
Tribikram Kundu

This paper explores the feasibility of detecting and quantifying corrosion and delamination at the interface between reinforcing steel bar and concrete using ultrasonic guided waves. The problem of corrosion and delamination of the reinforcing steel in the aging infrastructure has increased significantly in the last three decades and is likely to keep on increasing. Ultrasonic cylindrical guided waves that can propagate a long distance along the reinforcing steel bar are found to be sensitive to the interface conditions between steel bar and concrete. Ultrasonic transducers are used to launch and detect cylindrical guided waves along the steel bar. The traditional ultrasonic testing methods, for instance the pulse-echo method, where reflection, transmission, and scattering of longitudinal waves are used for detecting large voids in concrete, are not very efficient for detecting corrosion and delamination at the interface between concrete and steel bar. For this study four sets of specimens were prepared. They are rebars and plain steel bars with corrosion and physical separation. Transducers used during the experiment are the Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT) and the Piezoelectric Transducer (PZT). The experiment suggests that the guided wave inspection technique is feasible for the health monitoring of reinforced concrete structures. It also reveals that the ultrasonic guided waves are sensitive to the type of steel used and to the rib patterns on the reformed steel bars.


Author(s):  
Z Abbasi ◽  
F Honarvar

In recent years, Higher Order Modes Cluster (HOMC) guided waves have been considered for ultrasonic testing of plates and pipes. HOMC guided waves consist of higher order Lamb wave modes that travel together as a single nondispersive wave packet. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of frequency-thickness value on the contribution of Lamb wave modes in an HOMC guided wave. This is an important issue that has not been thoroughly investigated before. The contribution of each Lamb wave mode in an HOMC guided wave is studied by using a two-dimensional finite element model. The level of contribution of various Lamb wave modes to the wave cluster is verified by using a 2D FFT analysis. The results show that by increasing the frequency-thickness value, the order of contributing modes in the HOMC wave packet increases. The number of modes that comprise a cluster also increases up to a specific frequency-thickness value and then it starts to decrease. Plotting of the cross-sectional displacement patterns along the HOMC guided wave paths confirms the shifting of dominant modes from lower to higher order modes with increase of frequency-thickness value. Experimental measurements conducted on a mild steel plate are used to verify the finite element simulations. The experimental results are found to be in good agreement with simulations and confirm the changes observed in the level of contribution of Lamb wave modes in a wave cluster by changing the frequency-thickness value.


2010 ◽  
Vol 123-125 ◽  
pp. 899-902
Author(s):  
Chao Du ◽  
Qing Qing Ni ◽  
Toshiaki Natsuki

Signals propagate on plate-like structures as ultrasonic guided waves, and analysis of Lamb waves has been widely used for on-line monitoring. In this study, the wave velocities of symmetric and anti-symmetric modes in various directions of propagation were investigated. Since the wave velocities of these two modes are different, it is possible to compute the difference in their arrival times when these waves propagated the distance from the vibration source to sensor. This paper presents an evaluation formulation of wave velocity and describes a generalized algorithm for locating a vibration source on a thin, laminated plate. With the different velocities of two modes based on Lamb wave dispersion, the method uses two sensors to locate the source on a semi-infinite interval of a plate. The experimental procedure supporting this method employs pencil lead breaks to simulate vibration sources on quasi-isotropic and unidirectional laminated plates. The transient signals generated in this way are transformed using a wavelet transform. The vibration source locations are then detected by utilizing the distinct wave velocities and arrival times of the symmetric and anti-symmetric wave modes. The method is an effective technique for identifying impact locations on plate-like structures.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengwei Zhao ◽  
Sunia Tanweer ◽  
Jian Li ◽  
Min Lin ◽  
Xiang Zhang ◽  
...  

Abstract Nonlinear ultrasonic guided waves have superior sensitivity of the early fatigue damage. This paper investigates the analysis of the second harmonics of Lamb waves in a free boundary aluminum plate, and the internal resonance conditions between the Lamb wave primary modes and the second harmonics. The Murnaghan’s model is implemented in a finite element (FE) analysis to describe the hyperelastic constitutive relation for nonlinear acoustic modeling. The second harmonics of s0 mode are actuated by a 60kHz Hanning-windowed tone burst. A guided wave signal processing platform is developed for tomographic imaging. The different stages of fatigue are reflected by the changes of third-order elastic constants (TOECs) in Murnaghan’s model. The reconstructed damage locations match well with the actual ones cross different degrees and depths of fatigue.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca De Marchi ◽  
Emanuele Baravelli ◽  
Giampaolo Cera ◽  
Nicolò Speciale ◽  
Alessandro Marzani

To improve the defect detectability of Lamb wave inspection systems, the application of nonlinear signal processing was investigated. The approach is based on a Warped Frequency Transform (WFT) to compensate the dispersive behavior of ultrasonic guided waves, followed by a Wigner-Ville time-frequency analysis and the Hough Transform to further improve localization accuracy. As a result, an automatic detection procedure to locate defect-induced reflections was demonstrated and successfully tested by analyzing numerically simulated Lamb waves propagating in an aluminum plate. The proposed method is suitable for defect detection and can be easily implemented for real-world structural health monitoring applications.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhupeng Zheng ◽  
Ying Lei

Techniques based on ultrasonic guided waves (UGWs) play important roles in the structural health monitoring (SHM) of large-scale civil infrastructures. In this paper, dispersion equations of longitudinal wave propagation in reinforced concrete member are investigated for the purpose of monitoring steels embedded in concrete. For a steel bar embedded in concrete, not the velocity but the attenuation dispersion curves will be affected by the concrete. The effects of steel-to-concrete shear modulus ratio, density ratio, and Poisson’s ratio on propagation characteristics of guided wave in steel bar embedded in concrete were studied by the analysis of the real and imaginary parts of the wave number. The attenuation characteristics of guided waves of steel bar in different conditions including different bar concrete constraint and different diameter of steel bar are also analyzed. Studies of the influence of concrete on propagation characteristics of guided wave in steel bars embedded in concrete will increase the accuracy in judging the structure integrity and promote the level of defect detection for the steel bars embedded in concrete.


Author(s):  
Jian Liu ◽  
Jinhao Qiu ◽  
Weijie Chang ◽  
Hongli Ji ◽  
Kongjun Zhu

Metal-core piezoelectric fiber (MPF) is a new type of piezoelectric ceramic device with small size, and has great potential to be used as structurally integrated transducers for guided-wave (GW) structural health monitoring. This paper focuses on the use of MPF as ultrasonic Lamb wave receivers. First, the MPF sensor voltage response is derived by coupling the direct piezoelectric effect to the wave strain field excited by circular crested actuator. The obtained theoretical result is validated on an aluminum plate. Furthermore, the experiment that compares the MPF response to Lamb wave with the PZT response is performed. The results show that MPF sensors can be used to sense Lamb waves clearly. In the end, the directivity of MPF response to Lamb waves was investigated, and another experiment is performed to examine the directivity of MPF response to Lamb waves. The result shows that MPF has high directivity, which can be exploited to triangulate the location of an ultrasound source without prior knowledge of the wave velocity in the medium.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1028 ◽  
pp. 161-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zai Lin Yang ◽  
Hamada M. Elgamal ◽  
Yao Wang

Several techniques have been researched for detecting damage in plates. Each of these techniques offers their own unique advantages in detecting certain types of damage with various levels of analytical complexity. Lamb waves are guided waves that exist in thin walled structures. Because this type of wave can travel long distance with little attenuation, they have been studied intensively for structural health monitoring, especially in the past few decades. This paper presents an overview of using the Lamb waves in damage detection including the theory of lamb waves and the lamb-wave-based damage identification.


2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 849
Author(s):  
Rymantas Jonas Kazys ◽  
Justina Sestoke ◽  
Egidijus Zukauskas

Ultrasonic-guided waves are widely used for the non-destructive testing and material characterization of plates and thin films. In the case of thin plastic polyvinyl chloride (PVC), films up to 3.2 MHz with only two Lamb wave modes, antisymmetrical A0 and symmetrical S0, may propagate. At frequencies lower that 240 kHz, the velocity of the A0 mode becomes slower than the ultrasonic velocity in air which makes excitation and reception of such mode complicated. For excitation of both modes, we propose instead a single air-coupled ultrasonic transducer to use linear air-coupled arrays, which can be electronically readjusted to optimally excite and receive the A0 and S0 guided wave modes. The objective of this article was the numerical investigation of feasibility to excite different types of ultrasonic-guided waves, such as S0 and A0 modes in thin plastic films with the same electronically readjusted linear phased array. Three-dimensional and two-dimensional simulations of A0 and S0 Lamb wave modes using a single ultrasonic transducer and a linear phased array were performed. The obtained results clearly demonstrate feasibility to excite efficiently different guided wave modes in thin plastic films with readjusted phased array.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5498
Author(s):  
Chengwei Zhao ◽  
Sunia Tanweer ◽  
Jian Li ◽  
Min Lin ◽  
Xiang Zhang ◽  
...  

In this paper, the possibility of using nonlinear ultrasonic guided waves for early-life material degradation in metal plates is investigated through both computational modeling and study. The analysis of the second harmonics of Lamb waves in a free boundary aluminum plate, and the internal resonance conditions between the Lamb wave primary modes and the second harmonics are investigated. Subsequently, Murnaghan’s hyperelastic model is implemented in a finite element (FE) analysis to study the response of aluminum plates subjected to a 60 kHz Hanning-windowed tone burst. Different stages of material degradation are reflected as the changes in the third order elastic constants (TOECs) of the Murnaghan’s model. The reconstructed degradations match the actual ones well across various degrees of degradation. The effects of several relevant factors on the accuracy of reconstructions are also discussed.


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