Monitoring of Gas Permeability and Water Content in Large Concrete Structures: a New Method based on Pressure Pulse Testing

Franck Agostini (1) , Timothée Clauzon (2) , Alexis Courtois (2) , Frédéric Skoczylas (1)

1 LML - Laboratoire de Mécanique de Lille - FRE 3723
2 DTG - EDF - Division Technique Générale

EDF is steadily progressing on the quality of structural health monitoring by taking advantage of the latest innovations in sensors. The recent construction of the VeRCoRs mock-up (at EDF Lab Les Renardières, near Fontainebleau, France) enables to highlight significant advances in temperature, strain and moisture monitoring in concrete of the inner pre-stressed containment. The “gas-pressure-pulse-decay” (i.e. “pulse”) technology has been setup in this structure since September 2014, in order to measure the concrete water saturation. The pulse technique is not only a new sensor but also a strategy of measurements. The main idea behind the design of this new technique is to use the strong link between the concrete effective gas permeability and its water saturation. The main goal if this presentation is therefore to present the first results obtained in laboratory and in-situ. Despite usual concrete heterogeneities, the relative gas permeability of the VeRCoRs concrete can be obtained from lab experiments. They have been used in-situ to evaluate the water saturation evolution in deep walls as well as useful information on the concrete quality. The first results and their analysis which have been obtained for the VeRCoRs mock-up are described in the present paper.

Domaines: Matériaux et structures en mécanique [physics.class-ph]

Franck Agostini, Timothée Clauzon, Alexis Courtois, Frédéric Skoczylas. Monitoring of Gas Permeability and Water Content in Large Concrete Structures: a New Method based on Pressure Pulse Testing. TINCE Conference, Sep 2016, Paris, France. ⟨hal-01713909⟩