Reference-free corrosion damage diagnosis in steel strands using guided ultrasonic waves

This study presents a nondestructive evaluation method based on guided ultrasonic waves (GUW) to quantify corrosion damage of prestressing steel strands. Specifically, a reference-free algorithm is proposed to estimate the strand's cross-section loss by using dispersion curves, continuous wavelet transform, and wave velocity measurements. Accelerated corrosion tests are carried out to validate the proposed approach. Furthermore, the propagation of Heisenberg uncertainty to diameter measurement is also investigated. The method can reasonably estimate the wires' diameter without any baseline as a reference.