Visualization of damage in RC bridge deck for bullet trains with AE tomography

Abstract

In recent years, a lot of accidents associated with infrastructures occur in Japan because of the remarkable deterioration of the infrastructures. Considering the expected reduction of construction investment year after year, it is important to repair and reinforce those structures with the limited budget as well as to extend their service life in the future. From the viewpoint of management and maintenance for those ageing infrastructures, preventive maintenance shall be taken rather than the reactive maintenance. In the preventive maintenance, repairing and reinforcing structures shall be implemented before any fatal deterioration to the structures. However, the reasonable diagnostic method for preventive maintenance has not been established so far. NDT approaches to diagnose the early internal damage of structures is thus in high demand. To solve these issues, the authors had proposed “AE tomography” which executes both AE monitoring and elastic wave tomography. The AE tomography enables to provide accurate AE source locations as well as velocity distribution with the tomography simultaneously. In this paper, in order to verify this proposed AE tomography for in situ infrastructures, deteriorated RC bridge deck for bullet trains was investigated.