Setting Time Measurement of Concrete Mixtures through Monitoring of Shear-Wave Velocity with Shear-Horizontal Waves
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 34, Issue 9
Abstract
While the monitoring of longitudinal (P) waves has been widely investigated to estimate the initial setting time of concrete mixtures based on the variation in P-wave velocities, it is difficult to accurately estimate the setting time owing to the sensitivity of P-waves to air voids and the difficulties in identifying the final setting time from smooth velocity variations. Furthermore, shear-horizontal (SH) waves are advantageous over P waves for monitoring the setting time owing to their high signal-to-noise ratio and sensitivity of the shear-wave velocity () to solid structure development. This study proposes an SH-wave-based method to identify the abrupt increase in the values at the initial and final setting times. The proposed method was verified against traditional penetration resistance tests and P-wave tests with two sets of concrete specimens having different water-to-cement ratios. Although the initial setting times from the P-wave and SH-wave tests are close with the differences of 9% and 21% for the two sets of specimens, however, the smooth velocity variations from the P-wave tests cannot identify the final setting time that can be clearly captured with the abrupt increase of from the SH-wave tests. Both setting times from the SH-wave tests and the penetration resistance tests have a high correlation with a coefficient of determination () of 0.9875. The results demonstrated the high sensitivity of to the setting time and the potential applications of SH waves for monitoring the setting time of concrete mixtures.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship received from the first author of the National Science Foundation of China (51908104), Scientific Research Fund of Institute of Engineering Mechanics, China Earthquake Administration (2020D08), Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (2019M660597), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (DUT18RC(3)077).
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 34 • Issue 9 • September 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 15, 2021
Accepted: Jan 6, 2022
Published online: Jun 21, 2022
Published in print: Sep 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Nov 21, 2022
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