A preliminary study on the prediction of damaged areas on ordinary concrete and lightweight concrete using electromechanical impedance technique with different frequency ranges

The electromechanical impedance (EMI) method for NDE uses a single piezoelectric material to act as an actuator and a sensor simultaneously, and the EMI method is suitable for structures with complex surfaces. However, this technique still has wide range of problems which needs to be investigated. For one, locating damaged areas on a host structure precisely is known to be extremely difficult as this non-model based technique heavily relies on the variations in the impedance signatures. In this study, an attempt to locate the damaged areas on an ordinary concrete panel and a lightweight concrete panel using bottom ash is carried out by using different frequency ranges. Since the sensing range decreases as the excitation frequency of piezoelectric material increases, one can possibly predict the damaged areas by analyzing the impedance signatures from different frequency ranges. Statistical analysis method such as root mean square deviation (RMSD) is applied to determine the changes of the experimental structures, and the RMSD values of low frequency range and high frequency range are compared to verify the relationship between the frequency range and sensing range. Furthermore, the applicability of this method to locating the damaged areas is investigated on various materials including the lightweight concrete.