Analysis of the electromagnetic signature of reinforced concrete structures for nondestructive evaluation of corrosion damage

Abstract

This paper presents a nondestructive corrosion damage detection method for reinforced concrete structures based on the analysis of the electromagnetic signature of the steel rebar corrosion. The signature of the corrosion on the scattered field upon microwave illumination is first numerically analyzed. First-order quality factor parameters, the energy and the mean propagation delay, are proposed to quantify the corrosion amount in the structure. To validate the model, low-profile ultra-wide-band antennas (3–12 GHz) are fabricated and measured. Measurements on 12 reinforced concrete samples with induced corrosion are performed, using three different antenna setups. The experiments demonstrate a good correlation between an increase in the corrosion amount with a decrease in the energy and an increase in the time delay of the propagated signal.