DEVELOPMENT OF A NON DESTRUCTIVE EVALUATION TOOL CONCRETE USING WAVE EM–NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

The evaluation of moisture and chloride content of con-crete is a crucial phase for the diagnosis of corroded struc-tures in the context of heritage preservation. The use ofnon-destructive techniques (NDT) allows to carrying outan effective diagnosis. Electromagnetic waves in themicrowaves frequencies are recognized as a powerful toolfor moisture evaluation of dielectric materials as concrete.The goal of this study is to develop an optimal tool for theevaluation of moisture content on real structures based onelectromagnetic waves at frequencies range of 1 to 3 GHz.Numerical simulations of patch antennas were done foroptimal design and frequency. A comparison with mea-surements in air and on concrete having various moisturecontents indicated good effectiveness of the developedantennas.