• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.924-929
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• 2003

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.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.427-439
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• 2006

Accurate estimates of in place thickness of early age (3 to 28 days after casting) concrete pavements are needed, where a thickness accuracy of ${\pm}6mm$ is desired. The impact-echo method is a standardized non-destructive technique that has been applied for this task. However, the ability of impact-echo to achieve this precision goal is affected by Vp (measured) and ${\beta}$ (assumed) values that are applied in the computation. A deeper understanding of the effects of these parameters on the accuracy of impact-echo should allow the technique to be improved to meet the desired accuracy goal. In this paper, the results of experimental tests carried out on a range of concrete slabs are reported. Impact-echo thickness estimation errors caused by material property gradients and sensor type are identified. Correction factors to the standard analysis method are proposed to correct the identified errors and to increase the accuracy of the standard method. Results show that improved accuracy can be obtained in the field by applying these recommendations with the standard impact-echo method.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.230-237
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• 1997

As concrete structure is getting old and decrepit, its inspection and diagnosis is getting important. Therefore, it is necessary to estimate the soundness of structure using non-destructive tests for effective repairs and maintenances. But, applications of non-destructive tests in tunnel have been used restrictively, due to accessibility only from one side in tunnel lining and presence of tunnel installations. Recently, the various non-destructive techniques have been studied. Especially, ground penetrating radar(GPR) and impact echo (IE) methods have been researched for tunnel inspection. In this study, the applicability of impact echo test in tunnel lining inspection has been investigated. This paper described the tunnel inspection for lining thickness and internal flaw using impact echo tests. Model tests were carried out using impact echo test systems on two concrete models, Model I is measuring for lining thickness, Model II is detecting for internal flaw. Also, the test were applied for lining inspections in a tunnel constructed by NATM. From the results of impact echo tests, we have concluded that impact echo test is a very useful and effective technique for inspecting the concrete tunnel linings.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2003.03a
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• pp.309-314
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• 2003

Impact Echo method has been successful in detecting a variety of defects in concrete structure. This study has the objectives to show important aspects of applying the Discrete Wavelet Transform(DWT) to signal processing of Modified Impact Echo(ModIE) Measurement systems and to the understanding of the seismic wave propagation. The data of ModIE were processed by DWT and compared with the results of conventional ModIE Analysis. Although it is inconsistent in the evaluated thickness of concrete lining, the DWT provides the features of separation, synthesis and de-noising in the original signal. The application of technique by wavelet was explained numerically with ABAQUS and performed experimentally with a real scale model in this work. Further works on the possible ways for creating new mother wavelet are specially needed for the enhancement of seismic signal analysis.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.247-253
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• 2017

Generally, the vibration characteristics of refractory ceramics are identified by assuming them as isotropic materials. However, in practice, refractory ceramics exhibit anisotropic properties as they are manufactured by pressing ceramic powders along a particular direction. Therefore, in this research, the frequency responses of a refractory ceramic brick along its width, length, and height directions were acquired using finite element analysis by assuming that the ceramics had tetragonal symmetry in their material properties. The validity of the numerical analysis results was verified by comparing them with those from experimental measurements. Based on the frequency response, the thicknesses of the refractory brick along three different directions were estimated using the impact-echo technique. The maximum difference between the estimated and actual thicknesses was observed to be less than 5 %. This result confirms the effectiveness of the impact-echo technique along with anisotropic property characterization to evaluate the thickness of the refractory ceramic.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 2000.10b
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• pp.1261-1266
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• 2000

In the impact echo method, a stress pulse is introduced into an object at on accessible surface by a transmitter. The pulse propagates into the test object and is reflected by flaws or interfaces. In this paper, void and crack locations of concrete specimens were detected using impact echo method. In their modal identification procedures, the double least squares solution for Ibrahim Time Domain technique was used.

• Architectural research
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.179-184
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• 2016

The structure must be periodically checked and measures must be taken to prevent deterioration in building construction. From this point of view, a nondestructive test is essential to estimate whether the construction of buildings is proper, and whether the dimension of depositing concrete is consistent and without damage. This study estimated the thickness of the concrete component of construction framework using the ultrasonic velocity method and the impact echo method, in order to investigate reliability of the estimation of the thickness of normal strength concrete and high strength concrete, leading to the following conclusions. In the estimation of the thickness of the concrete structures, specimens of normal strength of 24MPa and specimens of high strength of 40MPa demonstrated an average error rate of 5.1% and 2.2%, respectively. The impact-echo method, one of the non-destructive tests, is verified as an efficient diagnostic technique. With this information, we will determine specific standards for the maintenance of structures, and the re-creation of lost building blueprints.

• 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.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.49-56
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• 2017

A clear correlation exists between the compressive strength and elastic modulus of concrete. Unfortunately, determining the static elastic modulus requires destructive methods and determining the dynamic elastic modulus is greatly complicated by the shape and size of the specimens. This paper reports on a novel approach to the prediction of compressive strength in concrete cylinders using numerical calculations in conjunction with the impact-echo method. This non-destructive technique involves obtaining the speeds of P-waves and S-waves using correction factors through numerical calculation based on frequencies measured using the impact-echo method. This approach makes it possible to calculate the dynamic elastic modulus with relative ease, thereby enabling the prediction of compressive strength. Experiment results demonstrate the speed, convenience, and efficacy of the proposed method.