Addressing Facility Needs for Concrete Assessment Using Ultrasonic Testing: Mid-year Report
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- EES-17: GEOPHYSICS, Visitor
The UFD Gap Analysis to Support Extended Storage of Used Nuclear Fuel (June 30, 2011) emphasizes the need for the development of monitoring techniques and technologies for dry storage cask materials. A high priority is given to the development of 'systems for early detection of confinement boundary degradation.' This requires both new techniques for monitoring and inspection, as well as new measurable parameters to quantify mechanical degradation. The use of Nonlinear Elastic Wave Spectroscopy (NEWS) has been shown to provide sensitive parameters correlating to mechanical degradation in a wide variety of materials. Herein we report upon recent research performed to address the high priority of concrete degradation using a selection of these techniques and compare to a ASTM standard ultrasonic technique. Also reported are the near term plans to continue this research in the remaining FY and into the coming years. This research was conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the Acoustics Lab of the Geophysics group in the Earth and Environmental Sciences division, and in collaboration with the Laboratory for Nondestructive Evaluation at the University of the Mediterranean (Aix en Provence, France) and the Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI). The objective of this research project was to determine the feasibility of using an NDE technique based on non-linear ultrasound for determining the depth and degree of microcracking in the near surface of concrete and to assess the degree of sensitivity of such technique. This objective is reached by the means of combining linear and nonlinear measurements, associated with numerical simulation. We first study the global effect of thermal damage on concrete's linear and nonlinear properties by resonance inspection techniques. We show that standard pulse wave speed techniques are not relevant to extract mechanical properties of concrete. The high sensitivity of measured nonlinearity is shown and serves as a validation tool for the rest of the study, i.e., probing the material nonlinearity at various depths through the use of Time Reversal Elastic Nonlinearity Diagnostic (TREND). The basic idea of probing the material nonlinearity at various depths by changing the frequency is validated by exhibiting a similar trend as nonlinear resonance measurements. We address at the end of this report, the potentialities of applying these procedures to real concrete structures.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- DOE/LANL
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 1038121
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-12-20274; TRN: US1201890
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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