Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea ISSN:1229-3059(Print) 2287-2302(Online) 한국전산구조공학회 논문집

Defects in aging infrastructures such as pre-stressed concrete bridges and cable bridges can cause a collapse of the entire structure. Defects, however, are often located inside of the structures that they are not visible from the outside. For example, in PSC bridges, because reinforcement steels are encased by exterior covers, corrosion and void on the reinforcement steel cannot be detected with a visual inspection. Therefore, in this paper, a new non-destructive evaluation(NDE) method that can detect defects inside of structures is presented. The new method utilizes sending of electrical signals, a method often utilized in electrical engineering to detect any discontinuities on power cables. In order to confirm the applicability and accuracy of the method, some experiments were conducted in the laboratory. And to overcome the hardship of conducting experiments on real structures due to their enormous size, simualtions were conudcted using a commercial program, COMSOL. The results of the experiments were analyzed and compared to confirm the accuracy of the simualtions.