Effect of Concrete Surface Crack Filling Conditions on Dominant Frequency of Surface Rayleigh Wave

Abstract

Elastic Surface Rayleigh Wave (R-wave) based non-destructive test (NDT) techniques have been studied broadly for concrete surface crack assessment in the past few decades. However, the effect of environment factors on the accuracy of R-wave NDT results are often being neglected. Sand and dust are ones of them that easily accumulate within the surface cracks of concrete structures, which potentially affect the characteristics of R-waves propagation when it travels through the concrete medium that containing cracks. This study is aimed to investigate the effect of concrete surface crack filling conditions to the dominant frequency of R-wave. Numerical simulations were conducted to study the changes of R-wave waveform when it propagated through a cracked concrete model with two various filling conditions, namely fine sand and charcoal powder. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for post-signal-processing (PSP) of raw R-wave signals to determine its dominant frequency. The results of numerical simulations were then justified by experimental measurements. It was found that the dominant frequency of R-wave is independent to the volume and the type of filling materials, but sensitive to the surface discontinuity of the concrete.