• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.365-381
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• 2023

The existing vision-based techniques for inspection and condition assessment of civil infrastructure are mostly manual and consequently time-consuming, expensive, subjective, and risky. As a viable alternative, researchers in the past resorted to deep learning-based autonomous damage detection algorithms for expedited post-disaster reconnaissance of structures. Although a number of automatic damage detection algorithms have been proposed, the scarcity of labeled training data remains a major concern. To address this issue, this study proposed a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on consistency regularization and cross-supervision. Image data from post-earthquake reconnaissance, that contains cracks, spalling, and exposed rebars are used to evaluate the proposed solution. Experiments are carried out under different data partition protocols, and it is shown that the proposed SSL method can make use of unlabeled images to enhance the segmentation performance when limited amount of ground truth labels are provided. This study also proposes DeepLab-AASPP and modified versions of U-Net++ based on channel-wise attention mechanism to better segment the components and damage areas from images of reinforced concrete buildings. The channel-wise attention mechanism can effectively improve the performance of the network by dynamically scaling the feature maps so that the networks can focus on more informative feature maps in the concatenation layer. The proposed DeepLab-AASPP achieves the best performance on component segmentation and damage state segmentation tasks with mIoU scores of 0.9850 and 0.7032, respectively. For crack, spalling, and rebar segmentation tasks, modified U-Net++ obtains the best performance with Igou scores (excluding the background pixels) of 0.5449, 0.9375, and 0.5018, respectively. The proposed architectures win the second place in IC-SHM2021 competition in all five tasks of Project 2.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.719-725
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• 2010

The analysis and experimental program of reinforced concrete (RC) structures for resistance against such extreme loads as earthquake, blast, and impact have been carried by many researchers and designers. Under the extreme loads, a large amount of energy is suddenly exerted to the structure, hence if the structure fails to absorb the impact energy, catastrophic collapse may occur. To prevent catastrophic collapse of structures, reinforced concrete must have adeguate toughness or it needs to be strengthened. The FRP strengthening method and SFRC are studied widely in resistance of impact load because of their high energy absorption capacity. In this study, drop weight impact tests were implemented to evaluate the impact resistance of SFRC and FRP strengthened RC beam while the total steel fiber volume fractions was fixed at 0.75% carbon FRP flexural strengthened RC beams. Futhermore, to prevent the shear-plug cracks when the impact load strikes the beams, additional FRP shear strengthening method are applied. The experimental, results showed that the FRP strengthened RC SFRC beams has high resistance of shear-plug cracks and crack width and SFRC has high resistance of concrete spalling failure compared to normal RC beams. The FRP flexural and shear strengthening RC beams has weakness in the spalling failure because the impact load concentrated the concrete face which is not strengthened with FRP sheets.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.591-610
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• 2020

Concrete with activated carbon and titanium dioxide (TiO₂) has been used to reduce the particulate matter (PM) in underground structures (e.g., tunnels) due to the high performance of nitrogen oxides (NOx) abatement. Damage (e.g. crack, spalling, or detachment) can be caused by the environmental and ageing effects on the surface of the particulate matter reduction concrete, installed on the tunnel lining. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the existence of spalling on the concrete surface for maintaining performance of NOx reduction. In this study, a basic research was performed for feasibility of spalling evaluation using electrical resistivity characteristics. Given the test results, the electrical resistivity was decreased as the ratios of activated carbon (0~15%) and TiO₂ (0~25%) were increased for specimens. Under a dry condition, electrical resistivity of cement specimens, mixed with activated carbon and TiO₂, was decreased up to 2.3 times, compared with the normal cement specimen. In addition, under saturation conditions (degree of saturation: 85~98%), electrical resistivity of cement specimens with activated carbon, was decreased up to 3.5 times, compared with the normal cement specimen. Regardless of the condition (dry or saturated), the difference of electrical resistivity values shows the range of 2.3~2.8 times between the mixing specimen (with activated carbon (15%) and TiO₂ (25%)) and the normal cement specimen. This study can help to provide basic knowledge for spalling evaluation using the electrical resistivity on the surface of the particulate matter reduction concrete in tunnels.

• Corrosion Science and Technology
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.100-107
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• 2005

Reinforcing steel bars in reinforced concrete structures are protected from corrosion by passive film on the steel surface inside concrete with high alkalinity. However, when the passive film breaks down due to chloride ion ingressed into the RC structures, a corrosion initiates at the surface of steel bars. Then, internal pressure by volume expansion of corrosion products in reinforcing bars induces cracking and spalling of cover concrete, which reduces not only durability performance but also structural performance in RC structures. In this paper, a service life prediction of RC structures is carried out by using a micro-mechanics based corrosion model. The corrosion model is composed of a chloride penetration model to evaluate the initiation of corrosion and an electric corrosion cell model and an oxygen diffusion model to evaluate the rate and the accumulated amounts of corrosion. Then, a corrosion cracking model is combined to the models to evaluate critical amount of corrosion product for initiation cracking in cover concrete. By implementing the models into a finite element analysis program, a time and space dependent corrosion analysis and a service life prediction of RC structures due to chloride attack are simulated and the results of the analysis are compared with test results. The effect of crack width on the corrosion and the service life of the RC structures are analyzed and discussed.

• International Journal of Concrete Structures and Materials
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.75-81
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• 2007

The concrete pavement of the Seohae Highway in Korea has suffered from serious distress, only four to seven years after construction. Deterioration due to Alkali-Silica Reaction (ASR) has seldom been reported per se in Korea, because the aggregate used for the cement concrete has been considered safe against alkali-silica reaction so far. The purpose of this study is to examine the deterioration caused by an alkali-silica reaction of concrete pavement in Korea. The investigation methods included visual inspection and Automatic Road Analyzer (ARAN) analysis of surface cracks, coring for internal cracks, stereo microscopic analysis, scanning electronic microscope (SEM) analysis, and electron dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDX) analysis. The results are presented as follows: the crack pattern of the concrete pavement in Korea was longitudinal cracking, map cracking or D-cracking. Local areas of damage were noticed four to five years after construction. The cracks started from edges or joints and spread out to slabs. The most intensive cracking was observed at the intersection of the transverse and longitudinal joints. Where cracking was the most intense, pieces of concrete and aggregate had spalled away from top surface and joint interface area. The progress of deterioration was very fast. The reaction product of alkali-silica gel was clearly identified by its generally colorless, white, or very pale yellow hue seen through a stereo optical microscopy. The typical locations of the reaction product were at the interface between aggregate and cement paste in a shape of a rim, within aggregate particles in the cracks, and in the large void in the cement paste. Most of the white products were found at interface or internal aggregates. SEM and EDX analysis confirmed that the white gel was a typical reaction product of ASR. The ASR gel in Korea mainly consisted of Silicate (Si) and Potassium (K) from the cement. The crack in the concrete pavement was caused by ASR. It seems that Korea is no longer safe from alkali-silica reaction.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.299-307
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• 2022

Cement-based matrixes have low tensile strength and negligible ductility. Adding fibres to these matrixes will improve their mechanical properties and make these composites suitable for structural applications. Post-cracking tensile strength of steel fibers-reinforced cementitious composite materials is directly related to the number of transverse fibers passing through the crack width and the pulling-out behavior of each of the fibers. Therefore, the exact recognition of the pullout behavior of single fibers is necessary to understand the uniaxial tensile and bending behavior of steel fiber-reinforced concrete. In this paper, an experimental study has been carried out on the pullout behavior of 3D (steel fibers with totally two hooks at both ends), 4D (steel fibers with a total of four hooks at both ends), and 5D (steel fibers with totally six hooks at both ends) in which the fibers have been located either perpendicular to the crack width or in an inclined manner. The pullout behavior of the mentioned steel fibers at an inclination angle of 0, 15, 30, 45, and 60 degrees and with embedded lengths of 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 millimetres is studied in order to explore the simultaneous effect of the inclination angle of the fibers relative to the alongside loading and the embedded length of fibers on the pullout response in each case, including the maximal pullout force, the slip of the maximum point of pullout force, pullout energy, fiber rupture, and concrete matrix spalling. The results showed that the maximum pullout energy in 3D, 4D, and 5D steel fibers with different embedded lengths occurs at 0 to 30° inclination angles. In 5D fibers, maximum pullout energy occurs at a 30° angle with a 25 mm embedded length.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.351-363
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• 2023

Visual structural inspections are an inseparable part of post-earthquake damage assessments. With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) establishing a new frontier in visual inspections, there are major computational challenges in processing the collected massive amounts of high-resolution visual data. We propose twin deep learning models that can provide accurate high-resolution structural components and damage segmentation masks efficiently. The traditional approach to cope with high memory computational demands is to either uniformly downsample the raw images at the price of losing fine local details or cropping smaller parts of the images leading to a loss of global contextual information. Therefore, our twin models comprising Trainable Resizing for high-resolution Segmentation Network (TRS-Net) and DmgFormer approaches the global and local semantics from different perspectives. TRS-Net is a compound, high-resolution segmentation architecture equipped with learnable downsampler and upsampler modules to minimize information loss for optimal performance and efficiency. DmgFormer utilizes a transformer backbone and a convolutional decoder head with skip connections on a grid of crops aiming for high precision learning without downsizing. An augmented inference technique is used to boost performance further and reduce the possible loss of context due to grid cropping. Comprehensive experiments have been performed on the 3D physics-based graphics models (PBGMs) synthetic environments in the QuakeCity dataset. The proposed framework is evaluated using several metrics on three segmentation tasks: component type, component damage state, and global damage (crack, rebar, spalling). The models were developed as part of the 2^nd International Competition for Structural Health Monitoring.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.98-103
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• 2017

In Korea, the guideline for the bridge safety inspection requests to assess surface degradation, including crack, efflorescence, spalling, and so on, for the rating of concrete bridges. Currently, the assessment of efflorescence is performed based on the visual inspection of expertized engineers, which may result in subjective inspection result. In this study, a novel method using a hyperspectral camera is proposed for objective and accurate assessment of concrete efflorescence. The hyperspectral camera acquires the light intensity for a number of continuous spectral bands of light for each pixel in an image, which makes the hyperspectral imaging technique provides more detailed information than a color camera that collects intensity for only three bands corresponding to RGB (red, green, and blue) colors. A stepwise assessment algorithm is proposed based on the spectral features to decompose efflorescence area from the inspected concrete area. The algorithm is tested in the laboratory test using two concrete specimens, one of which is dark colored with efflorescence on a surface while the other is bright concrete without efflorescence. The test shows high accuracy and applicability of the proposed efflorescence assessment using a hyperspectral camera.

• Journal of Powder Materials
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.44-49
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• 2014

In this study, nanocrystalline nickel powders were cold compacted by a dynamic compaction method using a single-stage gas gun system. A bending test was conducted to measure the bonding strengths of the compacted regions and microstructures of the specimen were analyzed using a scanning electron microscopy. The specimen was separated into two parts by a horizontal crack after compaction. Density test shows that the powder compaction occurred only in the upper part of the specimen. Brittle fracture was occurred during the bending test of the compact sample. Dispersion of shock energy due to spalling highly affected the bonding status of the nanocrystalline nickel powder.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.553-561
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• 2015

In this study, the performance assessment criterion for reasonable maintenance of shield TBM tunnel was presented. The performance assessment items such as crack, leakage, breakage, spalling, exfoliation/detachment, efflorescence, quality condition, exposure of steel, carbonation, faulting step, bolts condition, drainage condition, ground condition, contact section condition and conduit condition were selected by analyzing domestic and foreign performance assessment criterions and investigating segment lining deterioration cases through the site investigation and in-depth inspection analysis result on the shield TBM tunnel. In addition, the reasonable weight using AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) were estimated.