Air-coupled microphone measurements of guided waves in concrete plates

Abstract: Quality control and quality assurance of pavements is today primarily based on core samples. Air void content and pavement thickness are parameters that are evaluated. However, no parameter connected to the stiffness is evaluated. There is a need for fast and reliable test methods that are truly non-destructive in order to achieve an effective quality control and quality assurance of pavements. This licentiate thesis presents surface wave testing using air-coupled microphones as receivers. The measurements presented in this work are performed in order to move towards non-contact measurements of material stiffness. The non-contact measurements are compared to conventional accelerometer measurements in order to compare the noncontact measurements to a “reference test”. The two appended papers are focused on evaluating one parameter in each paper. In the first paper all equipment needed to perform non-contact measurements are mounted on a trolley in order to enable measurements while rolling the trolley forward. It is shown that rolling measurements can provide rapid and reliable measurements of the Rayleigh wave velocity over large areas. However, the measurements are shown to be sensitive to misalignments between the microphone array and the measured surface. An uneven surface can thus cause major errors in the calculated results. The second paper presents an alternative method to evaluate the thickness resonance frequency of a concrete plate. It is demonstrated how the established Impact Echo method can give erroneous results when aircoupled microphones are used as receivers. Instead a method based on backward wave propagation is introduced. It is demonstrated how waves with negative phase velocities can be identified in a narrow frequency span close to the thickness resonance.