Reliability of Non-Destructive Testing for Appraising the Deterioration State of ISR-Affected Concrete Sleepers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Concrete sleepers are essential components of railroad infrastructure, yet their service life has been reduced by one-third due to deterioration caused by internal swelling reactions (ISR), leading a major Brazilian railroad to replace millions of sleepers within a decade. This study investigates the reliability of various non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques to estimate damage levels in concrete sleepers. The methods evaluated include surface hardness testing, stress wave propagation, electromagnetic wave propagation using ground-penetrating radar (GPR), electrical resistivity, and resonant frequency. These techniques were applied to assess sleepers diagnosed as affected by alkali-silica reaction (ASR) and delayed ettringite formation (DEF) at different deterioration degrees. Although findings indicate that most NDT methods are limited and unreliable for quantifying ISR-induced damage, resonant frequency testing combined with energy dissipation analysis provided the highest accuracy across all damage stages and was able to capture microstructural changes before significant expansion occurred. These results support the use of vibration-based screening tools to enhance early detection and guide condition assessment of railroad infrastructure, helping to reduce the premature replacement of ISR-affected concrete sleepers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".