Análise comparativa das técnicas não destrutivas de esclerometria e ultrassom na avaliação de estruturas de concreto armado

Concrete is one of the most used materials in the world, considered by many the most important of Structural Engineering, as it is used in several applications. Therefore, arises the need for techniques of control and investigation of its conservation condition. Preventive inspection of concrete structures is a necessary strategy since sooner a problem is identified in the element, the greater are the savings in the repair procedure. A procedure widely used to evaluate the strength of concrete is through the compressive test on concrete cores extracted from the structure itself, however, this technique generates small damages to the element analyzed. Besides this method, there are other techniques to perform these evaluations, the non-destructive tests, whose techniques allow to evaluate the condition of concrete structures by their surface area, without causing losses in the resistance of the element. The evaluation made using equipment such as ultrasonic and sclerometer are examples of non-destructive tests. The main characteristics of these test techniques are the simplified process of execution, the exemption of the analysis process of the region of the structure to be performed the test; the absence of damage to the structure, agility in execution and the instant availability of results. The present work aims to use non-destructive sclerometric and ultrasonic techniques in concrete evaluation. For this, sclerometric and ultrasonic tests were performed on three concrete beams of the analyzed enterprise. The results obtained by the non-destructive techniques showed good agreement with the destructive tests, whose values indicate that the analyzed concrete presents excellent quality and resistance.