The Norwegian Public Road Administration (Statens Vegvesen) in collaboration with Elop Technology has initiated a feasibility test of Elop Insight scanner for NDT of wooden bridges starting from January 2024. The use of wood as a construction material has long traditions in Norway. This goes from building houses to ships to bridges. During the early days of bridge construction in Norway the by far most widely used building material was wood, and in the last decades the material has seen a renaissance with the use of glued laminated timber (glulam). When using wood as an outdoor construction ..read more

Ensuring the safety and durability of concrete structures is of utmost importance. However, achieving effective concrete repair and maintenance can be hindered by various challenges. Despite concrete’s renowned durability, it is susceptible to wear and tear over time. Cracking, for example, is a common issue in concrete due to freeze-thaw cycles, structural stress, or chemical exposure, as well as constant loading and unloading cycles. Carbonation, chloride attack and moisture penetration into the concrete can also lead to corrosion of reinforcement, efflorescence, and spalling. Identifying ..read more

  When acoustic waves are emitted into a complex solid medium like concrete, several acoustic wave modes are generated, and these different wave modes are reflected and scattered from interfaces and internal features such as backwalls/sidewalls, rebars, pipes, aggregates, voids etc. These reflections and scatterings can occur multiple times and interfere constructively or destructively. Sometimes these effects can cause very complex wave patterns propagating within the concrete which in turn can be seen as large amplitude variations, noise, and artifacts in the images. These undesired a ..read more

This is a potential feature, which allows mapping the velocity for a complete scan area and accurately estimating the strength of the concrete. Nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques used to evaluate concrete structures include visual inspections, Schmidt hammers, infrared thermography, ultrasonic testing, and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) among others. Ultrasonic testing is a widely used and effective nondestructive technique to evaluate concrete structures’ thickness, and embedded objects such as rebars, technical pipes and tendon ducts. Ultrasonic testing can also be used to detect voids ..read more

Ultrasonic testing – the perfect solution for detecting honeycombing in the concrete structure and helps ensure structural integrity. Honeycombing in concrete is a result of the inability of the concrete to fill the available space, resulting in cavities, voids, and gaps between the aggregates that resemble the structure of a honeybee nest. Improper or excessive vibration during concrete placement, poor workability of the concrete mix, overuse of admixtures, use of a stiff concrete mix, excessive water-cement ratio, dropping of concrete from a height during placement, dense reinforcement at ..read more

The implementation of SAFT in Elop Insight offers a range of benefits including high SNR and resolution, and the ability to generate easily interpretable 3D spatial images of internal features and defects in concrete structures. Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (SAFT) [1][2] and its cousins SAS (Synthetic Aperture Sonar) [3][4], and SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) [5][6], are well-established methods to form images with spatial information from the “raw” amplitude-vs-time-data output from the sensors (what we commonly refer to as A-scans in ultrasonic testing). These methods are successf ..read more

The use case demonstrates how Elop Insight can measure the depth of the floor slabs in a warehouse made of fiber reinforced concrete, providing accurate depth mapping and detecting potential problem spots, ensuring the safety and stability of the structure.  Elop Insight ultrasonic scanner is designed to penetrate through fiber reinforced concrete, a material widely used in floor slab construction, and map the depth with precision. Accurate depth mapping is crucial to avoid problems such as punching shear and to counter differential moments in relation to dead loads and live loads, such as s ..read more

Choosing the right inspection method to detect cracks in concrete is crucial. It ensures accurate detection and proper evaluation of the structure’s condition, leading to safer and more durable construction. Concrete is the most used construction material worldwide. It is a composite mixture of cement, water, and fine and coarse aggregates with or without different additives. Cracks can occur in concrete structures for various reasons including shrinkage, improper mixing and curing, poor quality of mixing, overloading, thermal expansion, freeze-thaw cycles, corrosion of reinforcing steel, an ..read more

Elop Insight is a ground-breaking dry coupling rolling ultrasonic scanner that is set to revolutionize the way non-destructive testing (NDT) ultrasonic scans are performed. This solution is designed to be cost effective and efficient for large area scans that enables customers to save both time and money. With its transceiver array sampling up to 32.000 data points every 2mm, the Elop Insight scanner combines accuracy and speed. The system can fully cover  400 m² per hour at a walking speed of up to 4 km/h. But more often it is not necessary to fully cover every millimeter. With for examp ..read more

Here at Elop Technology, we are dedicated to providing innovative solutions for non-destructive testing (NDT) of concrete. We are proud to announce the launch of our new Elastomer 3.0, which aims to improve image quality and reduce the push-down force for areas with a lot of roughness. The elastomer is a crucial component of the scanner as it helps propagate ultrasound signals smoothly into the concrete surface. The better the signal is propagated, the higher the image quality. The new Elastomer 3.0 has been designed to reduce the push-down force by approximately 30% compared to its previous ..read more