A 3-D image detection method of a surface opening crack in concrete using ultrasonic transducer arrays

The detection of the size and the location of existing three dimensional cracks in a concrete structure is an important topic in civil engineering. In this paper, a multisource, multireceiver method that considers the travel times diffracted by a crack tip is introduced, to backcalculate a 3-D image of the crack tip of a surface opening crack. The possible location of the crack tip front is on the surface of an ellipsoid, which is constructed by a fixed travel time length measured from the source to the receiver, by letting the source and receiver points be the foci of the corresponding ellipsoid. If the locations of the source and the receiver, together with the associated measured travel time of the diffracted echo between each source-receiver pair are known, the image of the tip can be determined by counting the number of intersections of the ellipsoidal surfaces in an image construction cellular structure. The backcalculated crack tip image, as seen from experimental data, match the dimensions of the real crack very well, demonstrating the capability and accuracy of this newly proposed multisource, multireceiver method for concrete NDE.