Ultrasonic-tomography system for nondestructive concrete structure testing

The safety supervision and quality evaluation of bridges, tunnels and buildings require the nondestructive testing of their inner properties.Conventional ultrasonic testing equipment only processes one-dimension signals that it receives, from which it is hard to get a clear description of the concrete structures.So a new ultrasonic-tomography system was developed, a specially designed great power and short pulse ultrasonic emitter was used.The ultrasonic signals passing through the concrete structures were captured by high speed signal acquisition circuit.The inner features of the concrete structures were computed by improved fast ART algorithm.In the detection test of the inner defects of concrete sample, the tomography image produced by the system clearly shows the inner structure of test sample.In another bridge pier intensity test, the new system produces bridge intensity tomography images, which are coincident with the detection results by rebound measurer.The experiment results show that the developed system can reproduce the inner intensity distribution and defects of concrete structure, and can be effectively used for the safety supervision and quality evaluation of concrete construction.