Non-Destructive Evaluation for Corrosion Monitoring in Concrete: A Review and Capability of Acoustic Emission Technique

Abstract

Corrosion of reinforced concrete (RC) structures has been one of the major causes of structural failure. Early detection of the corrosion process could help limit the location and the extent of necessary repairs or replacement, as well as reduce the cost associated with rehabilitation work. Non-destructive testing (NDT) methods have been found to be useful for in-situ evaluation of steel corrosion in RC, where the effect of steel corrosion and the integrity of the concrete structure can be assessed effectively. A complementary study of NDT methods for the investigation of corrosion is presented here. In this paper, acoustic emission (AE) effectively detects the corrosion of concrete structures at an early stage. The capability of the AE technique to detect corrosion occurring in real-time makes it a strong candidate for serving as an efficient NDT method, giving it an advantage over other NDT methods.

Identification of Reinforcement Corrosion in Large-Scale RC Beams with Acoustic Emission Sensing

“…The available standard NDT techniques used for corrosion monitoring include half-cell potential (HCP) and linear polarization resistance (LPR) methods [12][13]. The HCP technique enables the identification of the probability of corrosion activity of exposed reinforcing steel bars in RC structures.…”

“…On the other hand, the LPR method is utilized to monitor the rate of corrosion in RC structures. Nonetheless, this method is based on assuming uniform corrosion of the reinforcing steel, which may contradict with the actual corrosion process in existing structures [13]. It should also be mentioned that, the previously mentioned NDT methods are both not suitable for real-time monitoring and are typically intrusive [14].…”

Acoustic Emission Signal Analysis for the Integrity Evaluation

“…Measurement of AE signals during production processes or during loading of different structures usually generates a high number of detected signals. These signals can be associated to a patterns (vectors) composed of multiple relevant descriptors [13] to [16] with the intention to discriminate different damage mechanisms described with clusters. The patterns (vectors) can be classified into clusters according to their similarity by the use of multivariable data analyses based on pattern recognition algorithms [17].…”

The Testing Scheme for Steel Corrosion in the Reinforced Concrete via Near Field Effect of Meter-Band Wave

“…Roughly 40% of the engineering structure damages result from the steel corrosion [1]. Many techniques have been developed to detect and evaluate the steel failures [2], such as electrochemical method [3,4], linear ultrasonic testing (UT) [5], acoustic emission (AE) [6][7][8], eddy current testing (ECT) [9][10][11], infrared thermography (IRT) [12][13][14], ground penetrating radar (GPR) [15], magnetic flux leakage (MFL) [16,17], electronic resistance testing (ERT) [18], fiber bragg grating (FBG) [19,20], and X-ray diffraction (XRD) [21]. However, in the field of identification of corrosion in the steel components in RC structure, nondestructive test (NDT) is the optimal selection, because the mechanical integrity of RC structure is always required after inspection.…”