The Development of Concrete Quality Evaluation System - Automation of Measurement and Wireless Data Transfer

The velocity of elastic wave is usually the essential property that has to be measured in advance, when applying the civil NDT technique based on the theory of transient elastic wave. The accuracy and handiness of the velocity measuring method are often become a key about the practicability of the NDT method. In this paper, based on the transient elastic wave theory, an elastic-wave-velocity measurement system was developed. The interdisciplinary techniques related to civil engineering, electronic engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science were integrated to make this system more stable and easier to operate on the construction site. The processes during the measurement such as data capturing, signal processing and even data analysis are accomplished by the controlling software automatically. The measurement will be completed in seconds. Therefore, lots of data could be gathered in very short time and then used to estimate the quality of concrete. Besides, the wireless data transfer technology was also adopted in this system. With this function, more experts could monitor the measurement simultaneously through the Internet. In the preliminary experiment, the result shows good correlation between the wave velocity and the compression strength. It demonstrates the potential of this system on the application of NDT technology.