Towards Monitoring of Concrete Structures with Embedded Ultrasound Sensors and Coda Waves – First Results of DFG for CoDA

Epple, Niklas; Barroso, Daniel Fontoura; Niederleithinger, Ernst

Due to the importance of reinforced concrete structures for modern society, damage assessment during the entire life-cycle of such structures has become a special interest in non-destructive testing. Using embedded ultrasound sensors in combination with other measurement methods, numerical modeling and self-made data collectors, tailored specifically for monitoring tasks, the German research group DFG FOR CoDA aims to investigate and develop novel methods for damage detection and rapid model updating in reinforced concrete structures. In the first stage of the project, besides the development of custom-built, low-cost data collectors, ultrasonic transducers are embedded in a large, reinforced concrete specimen on a BAM test site near Berlin. In this experiment, the influence of changing environmental conditions (mainly temperature) on the ultrasound signal is investigated using coda-wave interferometry. The results show a correlation between changes in temperature and ultrasonic velocity. Such changes must be taken into consideration in a long-term monitoring setup to distinguish between reversible and permanent changes. By correcting the data using a linear relation between concrete temperature and velocity change to remove the seasonal trends and by low-pass filtering the data to remove daily variations can remove most of the temperature influence on the ultrasound measurements.