Today pre-stressed concrete bridges represent well over 50 percent of all bridges built. This increase has resulted from advancements in design and analysis procedures and materials, however the life of a concrete structure is still dependant on corrosion of the many internal steel reinforcements. As above, there appears to be a complete lack of appropriate international standards or specific regulations dealing with the Ultrasonic non-destructive testing (NDT) of concrete and reinforced concrete bridge structures. NDT methods for concrete structures consist of Impact hammer echo, ultrasonic velocity, radiography, Quantitative Acoustic Emission (QAE) and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). However, they all provide limited information and require a high level of technical interpretation.

Cross-It project will develop a new technology based on Ultrasonic Guided Waves, Automotive thermography and advanced GPR techniques to inspect the concrete structure for dangerous levels of age-related degradation, which could consist of cracks due to water ingress and corrosion of internal steel re-bars and reinforcement.

The developed Guided Waves technology will be able to scan the concrete and display the results as a visual map on a connected laptop. The laptop will run a purpose designed condition monitoring program based on advanced artificial Intelligence like a Neural Networks to match the ultrasonic patterns. Cross-it system could be also permanently installed to the bridge structure to enable a real time structural health monitoring system.