Characterization of steel buildings by means of non-destructive testing methods

Abstract

Non-destructive testing methods became popular within the last few years. For steel beams incorporated in buildings there are currently only destructive ways for testing the yield limit as well as for determination of the current stress level. Rise of ultrasonic and micro-magnetic tools for (non-destructive) measurements allows the characterization of the inbuilt material especially of old steel bridges as economical maintenance of the infrastructure. It is possible to determine the reserve of residuence of bridges or of any other existing steel buildings in order to upgrade them competitively for future usage by the possibility of a simple way of strengthening by welding or using bolds. This is done using modern devices for ultrasonic and micro magnetic data recording on the one hand and modern techniques from nonparametric statistics such as sieve, partition and semi-recursive estimators on the other hand.