Relation between bond quality and impact-echo frequency spectrum

peer reviewedAccording to EN 1504-10 and ACI Concrete Repair Manual, bond strength and interface quality are the main features of repair system necessary to be assessed. Pull-off test is most commonly used for bond strength evaluation but growing interest in nondestructive techniques (NDT) is recently noted. Impact-echo (IE) is treated as the most promising one for this purpose. The aim of this paper is to analyze an effect of bond quality on stress wave propagation in repair systems. A group of samples has been prepared in order to obtain repair systems of different bond quality. Prior to repair, quality of concrete substrates has been characterized according different techniques: compressive strength, superficial cohesion, surface roughness index and cracking quantification. Than a polymer-modified repair mortar has been applied. After hardening, IE signals have been recorded and pull-off bond strength determined. The relationships between parameters characterizing surface quality, bond strength, IE frequency spectrum and results of wavelet analysis of IE signal have been analyzed