Portable Guardrail Post Depth Nondestructive Testing System Research

Highway Guardrail Post is an important guarantee for the safety of thedriver, But sometimes,the embedment depth is not enough due to the lack ofeffective testing equipment and methods when construction. Pile machinery arewidely used pulling piles in detection work, but roadbed was destroyed in thedetection, the piles need to be buried in the foundation again, so, it’s time-consuming and strenuous by using this method,which bring a lot ofinconvenience to project supervision and testing. Therefore，a portable testingequipment need to be developed to achieve fast, accurate, non-destructivetesting.A nondestructive testing system of expressway guardrail post embeddeddepth based on the method of elastic wave was set up, graphical programlanguage LabVIEW was used as application software platform and the hardwarecomponents of the system consist of laptop、piezoelectric acceleration transducerand data acquisition card which selected according to the frequency got indetection before. Finally, the detection system is verified by experiments. Theshortcoming that not portable and not conducive to field work of generaldetecting equipment was overcome, reducing the cost of the equipment,improving the detection efficiency greatly.Two different types of columns were selected (the length of column1is1800mm, the length of column2is950mm) in the test which was taken inLaboratory. Finally, the theoretical value of elastic wave was used to calculatethe length of columns. The results show that the maximum absolute error ofembedded depth is less than15mm, and the maximum relative error is less than0.8%, which meet the engineering measurement requirements. The systemprovides a strong support for detection of using elastic wave method, laid afoundation for the development of more portable handheld equipment.