Assessment of surface cracks is important to ensuring the health of concrete structures. Traditional visual inspection processes are time-consuming and their performance depends heavily on the inspector’s skill and experience. In this paper, digital image processing techniques are employed to monitor the surface cracks in concrete. The automated processing method is proposed for further implementation to an flight drone.

Recently, air-coupled impact-echo (IE) tests for rapid damage detection in concrete structures have been popularly employed, but they typically require an acoustically shielded, high sensitivity, pre-polarized air-pressure sensor. In this study, two types of air-coupled sensors (condenser and dynamic microphones) and one contact sensor (displacement sensor) are evaluated with regard to characterization of delamination damage in a concrete slab using the IE method. The contact and contactless IE tests were carried out over a simulated slab with artificial delaminations. Results show that even the dynamic microphone successfully captures impact-echo signals in a contactless manner and without acoustic shielding.

Vibration resonance tests offer an efficient NDE method to identify and characterize shallow (near-surface) delamination defects that afflict RC structures. However, efficient implementation of effective modal analysis methods for this purpose is hindered by practical testing limitations. This paper studies vibration resonance data from square, rectangular, and circular near-surface delamination defects in concrete using air-coupled impact resonance test.