Study of Effects of Weathering Factors on Internal Structure of Rocks by Laser Ultrasonic Spectroscopy

摘要

The paper addresses the use of laser ultrasonic structuroscopy to study how weathering affects the internal structure of rocks used for facing buildings. For 1,250 hours rock samples were subjected to 150 cycles of freezing (at -20°C) and thawing in water (at +20°C) to determine their frost resistance. Also, moistened every 30 minutes, rock samples were exposed to thermal and ultraviolet radiation for 480 hours to determine their weather resistance. The frequency-dependent phase velocity and attenuation coefficient of longitudinal ultrasonic pulses in the samples were measured. It is found that the rock samples are most seriously damaged when exposed to sharp changes in temperature. As a result of freeze-thaw processes, the velocity of elastic waves decreases by 10% on average, and the attenuation coefficient increases by a factor of 1.5 in the range of 300kHz-500kHz and more than 3 times in the range of 1.0MHz-1.5MHz. The coefficient of the relative power of "structural" noise (K parameter) is introduced to characterize the degree of degradation of rock samples. The parameter K is defined as the ratio of the power of noise component in the spectrum of scattered waves to the power of reference signal. It is shown that the parameter K increases almost by a factor of 10 as a result of various weathering processes.