Surface and Subsurface Damage Detection in Cement-based Materials using Electrical Resistance Tomography

摘要

Cement-based materials are widely used in infrastructure facilities. However, often the degradation of structures leads to the failures earlier than designed service life. Thus, non-destructive testing techniques are urgently needed to evaluate the health information of the structures. In this paper, the implementation of Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) was investigated. This low cost, radiation free and easy to perform modality is based on measuring the electrical properties of the material under test and using that to evaluate the existence of defects in that material. It uses a set of boundary potentials and injected current to reconstruct the conductivity distribution. An automatic measurement system was developed and surface damages as well as subsurface damages on mortar specimens were investigated. The reconstructed images were capable to show the presence and the location of the damages.