STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF DEFECTED REINFORCED CONCRETE ELEMENTS USING ROBOTIC NDT TECHNOLOGY COUPLED WITH FINITE ELEMENT MODELING

Typically, reinforced concrete (RC) structures experience various defects such as honeycombing, void, corrosion, and debonding. Detection of these defects requires nondestructive techniques. The use of robotic nondestructive tests (NDT) is one of the strategies for detection needed to map the existing conditions of structures with defects. This paper is to evaluate the remaining life of those structures by the use of NDT coupled with ABAQUS numerical modeling. Robotic NDTs are employed to collect the in-situ data of existing structures. This includes Impact Echo (IE) to find the compressive strength and robotic Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to map interior defects. To perform the analysis, a MATLAB toolbox is developed to compute the Concrete Damage Plasticity (CDP) parameters as input data of ABAQUS. The nonlinear static general analysis is considered to model the concrete materials based on the CDP model. The model output is the load-displacement diagrams based on intervals of load applications. The model is validated against the experimental program performed for this purpose. The validations show that the ABAQUS simulation is highly comparable with the experimental results. Moreover, in order to compare the crack propagation and the failure of ABAQUS with the experimental program, the robotic GPR results are analyzed with RADAN software. The results of robotic GRP with the crack simulation of ABAQUS indicate that the simulation is highly accurate in predicting the crack propagation and the failure progress of RC structures.