Extended synthetic aperture focusing technique for ultrasonic imaging of concrete.

Quantitative nondestructive characterization of defects and inclusions in portland cement concrete structures are realized in this paper via extended reconstructions for linear array ultrasound systems. This is accomplished through generalization of traditional Kirchhoff-based synthetic aperture focusing technique migration to mitigate the effects of limited aperture and handle multiple scans as a single virtual array with increased effective aperture. Pearson’s correlation is utilized to account for uncertainty in relative position of individual measurement and mitigate the need for robotic precision when placing adjacent scans. The robustness of the method is demonstrated on artificially generated data as well as in-situ measurements for assessment of internal portland cement concrete characteristics such as inclusions and cracks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]