The construction of prestressed concrete bridges has witnessed a steep increase for the past 50 years worldwide. The constructed bridges exposed to various environmental conditions deteriorate all along their service life. One such degradation is corrosion, which can cause significant damage if it occurs on the main structural components, such as prestressing tendons. In this study, a novel non-destructive evaluation method to incorporate a movable yoke system with denoising algorithm based on kernel principal component analysis is developed and applied to identify the loss of cross-sectional area in corroded external prestressing tendons. The proposed method using denoised output voltage signals obtained from the measuring device appears to be a reliable and precise monitoring system to detect corrosion with less than 3% sectional loss.
Keywords: corrosion; denoising; external tendons; kernel principal component analysis; prestressed concrete bridges.