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High-Speed Acoustic Impact-Echo Sounding of Concrete Bridge Decks

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Abstract

Evaluation of deteriorating highway bridges requires new, rapid inspection methods to effectively guide repair in an era of limited fiscal resources. Of all the components of a bridge, the bridge deck typically deteriorates most quickly and must therefore be regularly inspected for non-visible internal cracking, called delamination, for which early detection and repair can enhance safety and performance as well as reduce long-term maintenance costs. This research demonstrates the development and deployment of a multi-channel acoustic impact-echo sounding apparatus equipped with specially-configured tire chains for acoustic excitation of the concrete, microphones, an array of sensors for establishing spatial position estimates, and a data processing architecture for accurately detecting and mapping delaminations in concrete bridge decks at high speeds. The new apparatus achieved very accurate results at speeds between 25 and 45 km/h across a bridge deck. These results demonstrate an orders-of-magnitude increase in data collection speed over all other acoustic impact-echo sounding techniques described in the literature.

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Acknowledgements

We thank David Anderson and his team of technicians for initial construction of the multi-channel trailer frame. We acknowledge support for this project from a Utah Technology Acceleration Grant and the Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering at Brigham Young University. Additional support was received from the Nebraska Department of Roads (Grant No. M075) and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program IDEA program (Grant No. NCHRP-IDEA 202). We also thank research assistants in the BYU Materials and Pavements Research Group for assistance with the chain-drag survey. The Titan Xp GPU used in this research was donated by NVIDIA Corporation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, 84602, USA

    Lorin J. Hendricks, Jared S. Baxter, Yao Chou, Mavrik Thomas, Enoch Boekweg & Brian A. Mazzeo

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, 84602, USA

    W. Spencer Guthrie

Authors
  1. Lorin J. Hendricks
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  2. Jared S. Baxter
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  3. Yao Chou
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  5. Enoch Boekweg
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  6. W. Spencer Guthrie
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  7. Brian A. Mazzeo
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Correspondence to Brian A. Mazzeo.

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Conflict of interest

B.M. and W.S.G. are inventors on a patent application filed by Brigham Young University related to the technology described in this paper.

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Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file1 (DOCX 17 kb)

Video obtained during field experiments in Provo, Utah, on June 19, 2018. Video was taken from a chase car and from the pedestrian path. Supplementary file2 (MP4 24594 kb)

10921_2020_695_MOESM3_ESM.mp3

7.95-s audio clip of a single channel recorded during a scanning pass, which was used to create Audio File S2. Supplementary file3 (MP3 138 kb)

10921_2020_695_MOESM4_ESM.mp3

1.0-s audio clip of a single channel corresponding to the spectrogram presented in Fig. 1D, with two prominent acoustic responses associated with delaminations being clearly audible. Supplementary file4 (MP3 18 kb)

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Hendricks, L.J., Baxter, J.S., Chou, Y. et al. High-Speed Acoustic Impact-Echo Sounding of Concrete Bridge Decks. J Nondestruct Eval 39, 58 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10921-020-00695-0

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