Abstract
Non-destructive measurement of stress can provide an effective way to explore the service life and performance degradation status of steel structures. In this paper, a measurement system is designed and developed, which includes both hardware and software systems. The hardware system consists of three modules: signal transmitting, signal conversion and signal receiving. The software system consists of four modules: signal storage, signal de-noising, calibration of stress to acoustic time difference factor, and stress calculation. To examine the performance of the system, a group of axial forces are applied on two steel members and axial stresses are measured on designed system. The strain gauge method is used for verification. The results show that the designed system is reliable and agrees with the results from strain gauge method. It has high potential to be applied in the field stress evaluation to monitor the structure, from pre-operation stage to service operation stage.