Experimental Study on Ultrasonic Monitoring of Splitting Failure in Reinforced Concrete

This paper investigates inspection of reinforced concrete elements sensitive to the splitting failure. The behaviour of a reinforced concrete specimen subjected to a tensile stress is considered. The damage detection procedure is based on the ultrasonic wave propagation technique. The piezoelectric transducers are located on both ends of the specimen and the measurements are taken periodically during the incrementally increased loading. The features of measured signals in time and frequency domains as well as wavelet transforms before and after the splitting failure are studied. The experimental results show that proposed method can be used for monitoring of damage evolution in concrete elements. The method makes possible detection of the moment just before the splitting failure occurs.