Skip to main content

A Study of Concrete Hydration and Dielectric Relaxation Mechanism Using Ground Penetrating Radar and Short-Time Fourier Transform

Abstract

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) was used to characterize the frequency-dependent dielectric relaxation phenomena in ordinary Portland cement (OPC) hydration in concrete changing from fresh to hardened state. The study was experimented by measuring the changes of GPR A-scan waveforms over a period of 90 days, and processed the waveforms with short-time Fourier transform (STFT) in joint time-frequency analysis (JTFA) domain rather than a conventional time or frequency domain alone. The signals of the direct wave traveled at the concrete surface and the reflected wave from an embedded steel bar were transformed with STFT, in which the changes of peak frequency over ages were tracked. The peak frequencies were found to increase with ages and the patterns were found to match closely with primarily the well-known OPC hydration process and secondarily, the evaporation effect. The close match is contributed to the simultaneous effects converting free to bound water over time, on both conventional OPC hydration and dielectric relaxation mechanisms.

Publisher note

To access the full article, please see PDF.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to W. L. Lai.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Lai, W.L., Kind, T. & Wiggenhauser, H. A Study of Concrete Hydration and Dielectric Relaxation Mechanism Using Ground Penetrating Radar and Short-Time Fourier Transform. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2010, 317216 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1155/2010/317216

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2010/317216

Keywords