Ultrasonic Tomograph of Concrete Building Structures with Lateral Signal Radiation

We consider ultrasound tomography of concrete building structures containing defects arranged at large angles to the antenna array (AA). In oblique sounding of such building units made of complex-structured concrete, the influence of pattern noise (PN) increases due to the effect of negative cross-correlation of PN signals on adjacent AA transducers. It has been shown that the optimum (providing the maximum signal–to–pattern-noise ratio) antenna-array pitch for oblique sounding should be (0.35–0.4)\(\lambda \). It is shown that, in the tomography of inside corners at the junction of two walls, it is advisable to use either two separate antenna arrays, designed for oblique sounding of building structures, located on different sides of a corner wall junction or a single antenna array consisting of two linear AAs combined into one antenna in order to more efficiently extract useful signals from PN and increase the angular resolution.