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This paper presents a newly developed system for bridges post-tensioned devices inspection. These devices are generally composed of cables placed inside a duct, the residual space being filled with a particular cement to avoid corrosion. The nondestructive experimental setup uses a capacitive sensor that gives some relevant information about the electrical properties of the materials located inside the duct. Then, using an original modeling of the interactions between the sensor and the post-tensioned device, a signal processing extracts useful information from the sensors data, like the thickness of an eventual air gap between the cement and the duct. Experimental and theoretical derivations and comparisons are presented in the different parts of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Interaction between a cavity or void in a liquid and a converging ultrasonic beam generated by a point-focused acoustic lens is investigated. A semi-analytical technique called the distributed point source method (DPSM) is adopted because no analytical solution is available for this problem involving cavities of different size and the finite element method is not very efficient for modeling high-frequency ultrasonic problems. The solution shows that if the cavity is placed very close to the focal point of the lens then it can be detected by the acoustic lens. The detectability of the cavity at the off-focus position depends on the distance of the cavity from the focal point. The variation of this distance as the cavity moves in horizontal and vertical directions from the focal point is also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modeling ultrasonic fields in front of a transducer in the presence and absence of a scatterer is a fundamental problem that has been attempted by different techniques: analytical, semi-analytical, and numerical. However, a comprehensive comparison study among these techniques is currently missing in the literature. The objective of this paper is to make this comparison for different ultrasonic field modeling problems with various degrees of difficulty. Four fundamental problems are considered: a flat circular transducer, a flat square transducer, a circular concave transducer, and a point focused transducer (concave lens) in the presence of a cavity. The ultrasonic field in front of a finite-sized transducer can be obtained by Huygens-Fresnel superposition principle that integrates the contributions of several point sources distributed on the transducer face. This integral which is also known as the Rayleigh integral or Rayleigh-Sommerfeld integral (RSI) can be evaluated analytically for obtaining the pressure field variation along the central axis of the transducer for simple geometries, such as a flat circular transducer. The semi-analytical solution is a newly developed mesh-free technique called the distributed point source method (DPSM). The numerical solution is obtained from finite element analysis. Note that the first three problems study the effect of the transducer size and shape, whereas the fourth problem computes the field in presence of a scatterer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]