This paper presents a numerical simulation of the propagation of ultrasonic waves along a soil nail using ABAQUS.Reinforcing existing infrastructures or building new ones demands innovative and cost-effective construction techniques.Soil nail wall, one of these techniques, has been widely used for supporting excavations or reinforcing existing slopes.Soil nail walls are constructed in-situ and built in stages from the top down without excavation soil behind.The drilled and grouted method is the most popular construction technique for soil nailing where a hole is drilled first in the ground followed by insertion of a soil nail and then grout of the annual space between the nail and the drill hole.Since the drill hole can be 10 or 20 m deep, soil collapsing or necking will appear during construction which will inevitably influence the quality of soil nails.Currently, the success of soil nail walls depends mainly on the quality control of the soil nails during construction through destructive pull-out tests.Therefore, it is highly necessary to develop a non-destructive testing (NDT) technique to replace these tedious and costly destructive testing.
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