Ultrasonic damage detection of concrete structures by using pulse-echo sensor arrays and SAFT

In ultrasonic nondestructive testing (NDT) of concrete structures, the synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT) can improve the resolution of target and therefore gives a better image display of the B-scan data. In traditional B-scan of concrete structures the ultrasonic transducers are usually moved manually to detect the whole structure, the detection speed and the consistency in different test points are greatly affected. A PZT sensor array is designed in this paper to perform B-scan on large concrete structures more efficiently. The excitation of the sensor array and the data processing techniques for the array data are discussed. A signal processing approach is proposed to improve the consistency between different test channels in the array. Experiments on real structures show the embedded objects can be located accurately by using the array sensor and SAFT method.