• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2005.03a
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• pp.33-40
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• 2005

Impact-echo test, a kind of simple and economical method to evaluate the integrity of drilled piles has some limitations to use because the stress wave can be generated only on the head of a pile and the wave propagation in the pile with surrounding soils are very complicated. Numerical analyses and model tests in the laboratory have shown that both the ratio of length to diameter of a pile and the stiffness ratio of pile to soil have influence on the resolution of testing results. Full scale testing piles which have artificial defects were used to verify the capability of impact-echo technique as a tool for the pile integrity evaluation. Behaviour of the reflected signal of stress wave was investigated according to the type of defects. Elastic modulus of the pile was calculated using the wave velocity in the pile and the unconfined strength of concrete specimen. Influences of the stiffness difference between the pile and the ground on the characteristics of a wave signal were also examined.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.659-666
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• 2015

In this paper, various influence factors on the impact-echo test which is an effective method in characterizing defects such as such as the delamination in the concrete structures were studied. The side to thickness ratio(a/h), the relative position of impacting and sensing points over the delamination that have great effects on the flexural and impact-echo(thickness) modes were investigated and examined by the parametric finite element analysis. As a result, the flexural modes dominate in the case of a/h > 2 and the thickness mode was more evident when a/h < 2. With regard to the relative position of impact source and sensing point to the defect, the flexural modes dominate even when either the loading or sensing point was over the delamination defect. However, the thickness mode prevails when both the impacting and sensing points are over the solid region beyond the delamination area.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.504-512
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• 2003

Simulation programs have been developed and used as an attempt to improve the accuracy of Non-Destructive Evaluation(NDE) techniques. The applicability of these programs is very limited, however, because it is difficult to describe the delicacy of the propagation of stress waves. To investigate the applicability of the finite element analysis for stress wave-based NDE techniques numerical simulation for Impact-Echo method and SASW method is performed. The numerical studies are performed to determine the essential parameters such as contact time of impact load, mesh size and time step size. These studies show that the choice of parameter is very important for improving the accuracy and confidence of the numerical procedure and, thereby, the applicability of the numerical analysis for stress wave-based NDE techniques

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.36-41
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• 2013

Previous study showed that delamination region in concrete structures can be successfully visualized using mode shapes of delaminated concrete section. However, modal tests for this purpose to obtain mode shapes of the delaminated concrete section may not be applicable in practice since, to correctly obtain the mode shapes of the section, the location and the shape of the delamination region in a structure should be known in advance. Unfortunately those are normally unknown in a real structure. Therefore, a moving forward test method may be useful to obtain the mode shapes of the concrete section when the location and the shape of the delamination region are not known. In this study, impact-echo testing based mode shape estimation technique is proposed and experimentally validated for visualization of delamination region.

• International Journal of Safety
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.17-22
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• 2008

Recent developments in contactless, air-coupled sensing of seismic and ultrasonic waves in concrete structures are presented. Contactless sensing allows for rapid, efficient and consistent data collection over a large volume of material. Two inspection applications are discussed: air-coupled impact-echo scanning of concrete structures using seismically generated waves, and air-coupled imaging of internal damages in concrete using ultrasonic tomography. The first application aims to locate and characterize shallow delamination defects within concrete bridge decks. Impact-echo method is applied to scan defected concrete slabs using air coupled sensors. Next, efforts to apply air-coupled ultrasonic tomography to concrete damage imaging are discussed. Preliminary results are presented for air-coupled ultrasonic tomography applied to solid elements to locate internal defects. The results demonstrate that, with continued development, air-coupled ultrasonic tomography may provide improved evaluation of unseen material defects within structures.

• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2001.03a
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• pp.49-56
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• 2001

The techniques to make assessment of the structural integrity of underground structures include Infrared thermagraphy, GPR using the reflection of the electromagnetic wave, ultrasonic test, seismic methods using the propagation of elastic wave, and etc These methods have pros and cons in the assessment of the structural integrity in the complex environment of the underground structure, so that a single method alone is not enough to evaluate parameters required for the assessment. In this study, a new seismic method was proposed to improve the existing methods and to provide an additional information like stiffness of concrete. The proposed method combines the advantages of the modified impact-echo test and the SASW method. To verify the validity of the proposed method, a large scale model of a tunnel concrete liner was built and the proposed method was applied to the center of the model and also to the corner of the model which has several distinct reflection boundaries.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2006.05b
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• pp.432-437
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• 2006

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.19-30
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• 2009

For the purpose of determining the thickness of concrete lining and detect of the cavity where may be located behind tunnel lining, IE (Impact-Echo) method it effectively useful in the tunnel safety diagnosis and the quality control during the construction. As a part of case study, we applied IE method to various tunnel structure types such as road tunnel and subway tunnel constructed by NATM (New Austrian Tunnelling Method) and ASSM (American Steel Support Method). As tunnel specifications estimated from this method were compared with coring data, design drawing and other survey results, it was very good agreement with each other. In conclusion, we verified that IE method shows an accurate and reliable result. The conventional interpretation of IE method in frequency domain gives only vertical information at a certain point. However, the interpretation using time-frequency analysis and depth section imaging technique from two dimensional profiling surveys can show more reliable information about structure inside.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.259-269
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• 1999

Elastic wave velocity measurement technique such as impact-echo method and ultrasonic pulse velocity method has been successfully used to evaluate the moduli and strength of concrete. However, estimation results obtained by the NDT methods do not agree well with real things because longitudinal wave velocity is influenced by various factors. In this paper, among several factors influencing P-wave velocity, the influence of moisture content in concrete was investigated through the experiment. Test results show that longitudinal wave velocity is significantly affected by the moisture content of concrete, i.e., the lower moisture content. the lower velocity. Moisture content influences rod-wave velocity measured by impact-echo method stronger than ultrasonic pulse velocity measured by transmission method. During drying process with ages. the difference of increasing rate between longitudinal wave velocity and compressive strength of concrete is gradually increased. Therefore, to establish more accurate relationship between longitudinal wave velocity and strength, the difference of the increasing rate should be considered.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.131-144
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• 2000

본 연구는 비검측공 시험법으로서 널리 사용되고 있는 충격반향기법(impact-echo test)의 적용서을 수치해석 및 실내 실험을 통하여 분석해 보았다. 즉, 결함이 없는 말뚝과 결함이 있는 말뚝에 대하여 1차원 및 2차원 축대칭 유한요소해석을 실시하였으며, 또한 모노캐스트라고 하는 일종의 플라스틱 원형 봉의 말뚝에 축대창 공극, 비축대칭 공극, 병목부 및 단면 확대부와 같은 결함을 각각 크기와 깊이를 변화시켜 제작한 후 공기 중과 지반 내부에서 충격반향기법 실험을 수행하였다. 실험결과 충격반향기법의 말뚝 결함 탐지능력은 수치해석에서 얻은 결과와 함께 결함의 크기와 위치에 영향을 받는 것으로 나타났으며 결함의 크기가 커질수록 탐지의 정확도가 향상되는 것을 알 수 있었다. 결함의 상대면적이 말뚝 단면적의 50% 이상이면 충격반향기법에 의하여 결함의 위치를 파악할 수 있는 것으로 나타났으며, 공기 중 보다 지반에 근입 된 말뚝의 경우가 더욱 명확한 신호를 제공해주는 것으로 나타났다. 그리고 시간영역의 신호가 주파수 영역의 신호 보다 말뚝의 결함 크기에 더 민감히 반응하므로 주파수 영역에서 탐지할 수 없는 작은 크기의 결함을 시간 영역에서는 탐지할 수 있는 것으로 나타났다.