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Keywords |
impact echo test; flaws; concrete slabs; transfer function; virtual instrument |
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Abstract |
A majority of infrastructures has been deteriorated over time. Therefore, it is very important to verify the quality of construction, and the level of structural deterioration in existing structures, to ensure their safety and functionality. Many researchers have studied non-destructive testing (NDT) methods to identify structural problems in existing structures. The impact echo technique is one of the widely used NDT techniques. The impact echo technique has several inherent problems, including the difficulties in P-wave velocity evaluation due to inhomogeneous concrete properties, deterioration of evaluation accuracy where multiple reflection boundaries exist, and the influence of the receiver location in evaluating the thickness of the tested structures. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to propose an enhanced impact echo technique that can reduce the aforementioned problems and develop a Virtual Instrument for the application via a thickness evaluation technique which has same technical background to find deterioration in concrete structures. In the proposed impact echo technique, transfer function from dual channel system analysis is used, and coherence is improved to achieve reliable data. Also an averaged signal -ensemble- is used to achieve more reliable results. From the analysis of transfer function, the thickness is effectively identified.
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