Contactless ultrasonic wavefield imaging to visualize near-surface damage in concrete elements

Abstract

We present work to detect and visualize near-surface damage in concrete using contactless ultrasonic wavefield imaging technology. A fully contactless ultrasonic scanning system that utilizes a micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) ultrasonic microphone array is used to collect ultrasonic surface wave data from a concrete sample. The obtained wavefield data sets are processed with a frequency-wavenumber (f-k) domain wavefield filtering approach to extract non-propagating oscillatory fields set up by near-surface concrete cracking damage. The experimental results demonstrate that near-surface concrete damage can be detected and visualized using the proposed ultrasonic wavefield imaging approach.