Ep Ⅰ｜Records of USST-ers During the Summer Holidays

Researchers in USST have never failed to seize every opportunity to be bold. Sky is the limit when it comes to the place for scientific research.
With the rapid development of the construction industry, the problem of cutting corners has arisen in the pursuit of progress in construction projects. One of the most notorious means is to replace standard steel bars with those of substandard diameters or even bamboo sheets. Therefore, the supervision of construction quality requires the examination of the diameters, positions and materials of the bars embedded in the wall. Traditional techniques of such examination are generally to drill holes in the wall, which not only damages the building, but also fails to examine every steel bar. Jerry-built projects can thus, to a certain extent, get away with it by stealth.

The “THz wall reinforcement detector” is led by Professor Yuan Minghui from the School of Optical-electrical and Computer Engineering. It is compact and portable, and takes advantage of characteristics of terahertz waves and millimeter waves, i.e. their high penetrability into nonmetallic building entities such as cement, bricks, lime, etc. and almost zero penetrability into metals, which permits the examination of diameters, positions and materials of the bars without damage to the wall. Now, jerry-built projects have nowhere to hide.
The repetitive examinations and analysis of massive data never tire professor Yuan Minghui. Just as he said,  "Summer vacation is the prime time for scientific research. We all hope to make good use of it and solve some practical application problems through tests. We should contribute our professional knowledge to the improvement of engineering quality."