• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.39-47
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• 1989

As the necessity of the safety diagnosis of the concrete structure, more reliable ultrasonic technique to qualify the concrete is required. In this study, the artificial surface crack depth is measured using several types of the ultrasonic probes. As results, the horizontal shear wave probe is most useful to determine the crack depth compared to the other probes. For the surface wave probe, the ultrasonic wave path is changed with the surface crack depth.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.4 no.1 s.9
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• pp.55-62
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• 2000

A surface acoustic wave method for the evaluation of small fatigue crack initiated from a pit-type surface flaw is presented. In-situ ultrasonic experiments are performed for aluminum 2024-T3 alloy samples under the fatigue test. During the fatigue test, the surface acoustic wave reflection signal from the pit and crack is measured under different hold-stress levels. From the measured and predicted surface wave reflections the depths of fully and partially open cracks are determined and results are verified by comparing with SEM fractography The crack opening behavior of the fatigue crack is evaluated from the predicted effective crack depths. The method developed in this study can be applied to monitor and characterize crack initiation and propagation from pit-type surface flaws in the early stage of fatigue life.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.84-89
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• 2006

A laser ultrasonic inspection system is a non-contact inspection device which generates and measures ultrasounds by using laser beams. A laser ultrasonic inspection system provides a high measurement resolution because the ultrasonic signal generated by a pulse laser beam has a wide-band spectrum and the ultrasonic signal is measured from a small focused spot of a measuring laser beam. In this paper, we have investigated the detection techniques of a surface-breaking crack by using the laser ultrasonic surface waves. A crack acts as a low pass filter whose cut-off frequency is lowered in proportion to the depth of a crack. And, the center frequency value of a spectrum is decreased in proportion to the depth of a crack. In this paper, we extracted the crack information by using the frequency attenuation from the normalized transfer function spectrum of a surface-breaking crack. Also, we effectively measured the crack depth by using the decreasing value of the center frequency from a crack passed ultrasonic signal. The proposed measuring techniques of crack depths provided more precise information than the amplitude measuring technique.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.373-388
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• 2022

A USW based diagnostic procedure is presented for estimating the depth of surface-breaking cracks. The diagnosis is demonstrated on seven lab-scale SFRC beam specimens, which are subjected to the CMOD controlled three-point bending test to create real bending cracks. Then, the recorded multiple ultrasonic signals are examined with the signal processing techniques, including wavelet transform and two-dimensional Fourier transform, to investigate the relationships between the crack depth and two diagnostic indices, namely the attenuation coefficient and dispersion index (DI). Finally, the reliabilities of these indices for depth estimation are verified with the visually measured crack depths as well as the crack features obtained with a digital image processing algorithm. It is found that the DI outperforms the attenuation coefficient in depth estimation, where this index displays good agreement with the visual inspection for 86% of the inspected specimens.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 1999.10a
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• pp.659-662
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• 1999

Ultrasonic pulse velocity method is employed for evaluation of crack depth in concrete structures. Due to the heterogeneous nature of concrete and the indirect transmission arrangement for the transit time measurement through the surface-opening cracks in concrete structures, ultrasonic pulse velocity has so many variations as crack depths and transmission lengths vary. In this study, ultrasonic pulse velocity method is investigated to evaluate the surface-opening crack depth of concrete slabs, reinforced concrete slabs, reinforced concrete flexural members. the resent study gives a modified method for deminishing errors in transit time measurements and show limitations to the evaluation of crack depth in reinforced concrete structures.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.175-180
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• 2003

Ultrasonic pulse velocity method is applied many times for measuring surface crack depth of concrete in case of diagnosis of concrete structures. By the way, this method has an error accompanying measured surface crack depth of concrete because there are many uncertainty factors. So, it is necessary to study for an error of this method affected by these uncertainty factors. Two error factors(uncertainty factors) are tested and analyzed in this study. One is for an error according to measuring the propagation time of ultrasonic wave and the arrangement distance of transducers. Another is for an error according to positioning the transducer as a distance to surface crack from the transducer.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.181-188
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• 2002

The objective of this study is to determine crack depth located under steel reinforcement in concrete specimens using ultrasonic method. Experimental studies were performed on concrete specimens containing vertical and inclined surface-opening cracks with known depths. The other studies were carried out on specimens with flexural crack. Experimental results have shown that the crack depth is effectually measured when the distance between the probes is less than the crack depth. The effect of steel on crack depth estimation is studied through a model by considering P-waves diffaction at the tip of crack and steel. In addition, experimental results show that the ultrasonic method is one of useful methods to evaluate the crack depth in reinforced concrete.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.152-162
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• 2001

Laser-generated ultrasonic technique which is one of the reliable nondestructive evaluation techniques has been applied to evaluate the integrity of structures by analyzing the characteristics of signal obtained from surface crack. Therefore, the signal analysis of the laser-generated ultrasonics is absolutely necessary for the accurate and quantitative estimation of the surface defects. In this study, one-sided measurement by laser-generated ultrasonic has been applied to evaluate the depth of the surface-breaking crack in the materials. However, since the ultrasonic waveform excited by pulse laser is very difficult to distinguish the defect signals, it is necessary to consider the signal analyses of the transient waveform. Wavelet Transform(WT) is a powerful tool for processing transient signals with temporally varying spectra that helps to resolve high and low frequency transient components effectively. In this paper, the analyses of the surface-breaking crack of the ultrasonic signal excited by pulse laser are presented by employing the WT analyses.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.24 no.1 s.173
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• pp.52-61
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• 2000

The role of quantitative nondestructive evaluation of defects is becoming more important to assure the reliability and the safety of structure, which can eventually be used for residual life evaluation of structure on the basis of fracture mechanics approach. Although ultrasonic technique is one of the most widely used techniques for application of practical field test among the various nondestructive evaluation technique, there are still some problems to be solved in effective extraction and classification of ultrasonic signal from their noisy ultrasonic waveforms. Therefore, crack size determination through a neural network based on the back-propagation algorithm using back-scattered ultrasonic signals is established in this study. For this purpose, aluminum plate containing vertical or inclined surface breaking crack with different crack length was used to receive the back-scattered ultrasonic signals by pulse echo method. Some features extracted from these signals and sizes of cracks were used to train neural network and the neural network's output of the crack size are compared with the true answer.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.180-185
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• 2004

Conventional ultrasonic examination to detect micro and small surface cracks is based on the pulse-echo technique using a normal immersion focused transducer with high frequency, or an angle-beam transducer generating surface waves. It is difficult to make an automatic ultrasonic system that can detect micro and small surface cracks and position in a large structure like steel and ceramic rolls, because of the huge data of inspection and the ambiguous position data of the transducer. In this study, a high-precision scanning acoustic microscope with a 10MHz large-aperture transducer has been used to assess the existence, position and depth of a surface crack from the real-time A, B, C scans obtained by exploiting the ultrasonic diffraction. The ultrasonic method with large aperture transducer has improved the accuracy of the crack depth assessment and also the scanning speed by ten times, compared with the conventional ultrasonic methods.