Abstract
Although the non-destructive testing method for concrete structure has been developed so much, the one for soil structure has not been examined well. When the leakage of water through the embankment is found, the water passageway and the flow-regime have to be understood for the countermeasure and maintenance planning. In this paper, the method to infer the water table in an embankment by the elastic wave exploration which has been used intensively for the geological survey was studied. The theory used for the impact echo method for the concrete structure was applied to infer the location of the reflection point. The result of frequency analysis was used for the inference. Moreover, since the power is dependent on difference of the acoustic impedance between layers, the ratio of power to the maximum one was plotted to emphasize the location of reflections. By comparing with the results from the high density electric exploration, it was found that the newly proposed method was very useful to infer the situation of water distribution in an embankment.
