A tailor-made cylindrical concrete implantable module for damage imaging in plate-like concrete structures

In this research, a tailor-made cylindrical concrete implantable module (CCIM) was proposed for damage imaging in concrete structures. The CCIM can be directly implanted into inspected structure to transmit and receive probing stress waves, which allows conveniently removing and updating CCIM when devices failed to work. Moreover, a CCIM-based multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is proposed to realize two-dimensional damage visualization. Based on meso-level finite element simulation, considering concrete as a three-phase composite material, the stress wave propagation characteristics can be revealed and the effectiveness of CCIM-based MUSIC imaging method has been investigated. To verify the proposed method experimentally, a pair of CCIMs were fabricated and implanted into two concrete specimens with different configurations. The results could effectively pinpoint damage location within inspected area. The proposed hardware and algorithm has great potential to overcome the disadvantage of short service period and could be applied for damaging imaging in concrete structures.