Inspection of the lids of shallowly buried concrete structures based on the propagation of surface waves- PART II

Abstract

The possibility of performing the inspection of an underground structure directly from the surface of the soil would be advantageous for the inspection of various type of underground utility structures present in modern cities. In part I, the behavior of elastic waves propagating in a soil profile containing a shallowly buried underground concrete utility structure was studied and it was found that it is possible to evaluate the condition of the surface of the lid of such structures based on the propagation velocity of elastic waves. The part II follows from the work that was previously performed to develop a nondestructive technique for the inspection of shallowly buried utility structures based on the propagation of elastic waves. First, the three-dimensional finite difference method implemented in the software Fast Lagrangian Analysis of Continuum was used to model an underground concrete structure to show how the presence of a manhole and of a pavement at the surface of the soil affect the propagation of elastic waves. Second, a receiver configuration typically used in three-dimensional seismic surveys is presented and its effectiveness is tested on three different existing underground structures. The signals collected during the field tests are analyzed independently in the velocity-frequency plane using an adaptive signal processing technique. The velocity-frequency representation of each signal is then used to identify the different elastic waves and to calculate their group velocities. Third, the variation of the group velocity at the surface of the three concrete structures is presented in the form of two-dimensional contour maps that enabled the detection of anomalies on the surface of two of these structures. Finally, it is shown how the collected data can be used to obtain a three-dimensional tomography representative of the condition of the surface of an underground structure.