Enhanced air-coupled impact echo technique by phase analysis of signals from multiple sensors

This paper presents an air-coupled impact echo(IE)technique that relies on the phase spectrum of the collected data to find the frequencies corresponding to the reflections from delaminations.The proposed technique takes advantage of the fact that the IE compression wave is not a propagating wave,but it is the 1st order symmetrical(S1)mode Lamb wave at zero group velocity(S1-ZGV).Therefore,it searches the phase spectra of the data collected by multiple sensors to locate the frequency corresponding to the lowest phase difference.As a result,the technique reduces the effect of propagating waves,including the direct acoustic wave and ambient noise.It is named the Constant Phase IE(CPIE).The performance of the CPIE is experimentally compared with the regular amplitude spectrum-based IE technique and two other multisensor IE techniques.The CPIE shows a performance advantage,especially in a noisy environment.

Color ImageBased Defect Detection Method for Bridge Coating Assessment

This paper presents a highly efficient method for recognizing the existence of bridge coating rust defects by using color image processing. The detection of defects on steel bridge surfaces during the operation and maintenance of bridge structures is important to ensure the safety and reliability of them. More advanced techniques such as digital image processing have been studied for better monitoring and detection as existing infrastructure systems are aged and deteriorated rapidly. Recently, image-based defect recognition and assessment methods have gained considerable attention in the civil engineering domain due to their accuracy, speed, and lower cost. The proposed method in this paper is a fast decision-making system by utilizing color image processing. It was developed by processing original bridge coating images to generate color values and calculating eigenvalues from each digitized image. The values from two different groups, a defective group and a nondefective group, are compared each other to figure out the feasibility of this approach. Finally, an automated defect recognition method is presented and tested with more images. This method can be used to make a decision whether a given digitized image contains defects.

Design and validation of wireless strain test system for bridge based on the resistance strain sensor

In order to achieve an access to strain sensor data with wireless transmission in bridge engineering structure testing, a wireless strain test system is presented based on the resistance strain sensor of networks. The wireless bridge strain test system composed of master station and substation adopts the wireless method to realize the high accuracy data acquisition between the master station and the substation under a reliable communication protocol. The system has been tested in contrast with the present strain apparatus. Results show that the wireless system is high-reliable, and has many characteristics such as high efficiency, good precision, high stability with low cost, and good flexibility, without using the present communication network.