ABSTRACT
The paper presents experimental studies on tomographic imaging brittle damage in slabs. Measurements were made preliminarily on an artificially damaged acrylic glass plate model and next, on a slab of a composite steel-concrete truss, cyclically and statically loaded. The methodology of transmission ultrasonic tomography was used to determine the distribution of longitudinal wave velocity in the elements whose local declines result from elastic degradation. Two simplifying assumptions are introduced in the considerations: the fastest travel of ultrasonic waves occurs along a straight line, and the studied area is divided into rectangular cells in which the investigated wave velocities are constant. It leads to the formulation of a linear system of equations with respect to the unknowns of the task, but it is ill-conditioned. Thus, in the work, the results obtained after the regularization of problem using Tikhonov’s method were reported, resulting in a quantitative and qualitative improvement.
