Building concrete structure assessment using image-based non-destructive technique

Abstract

Buildings and infrastructures need to be maintained regularly throughout the entire of their operational life. The building structural health monitoring system is produced to prevent the occurring of hazardous incident. However, the health information of these buildings are not being recorded and reported by the construction and building industry. Hence, issue of deterioration of building structural concrete in recent years had become an alarming issue that highlighted extensively throughout the world. The building infrastructure management, rehabilitation or maintenance is needed indeed to extend the service lives of these buildings, especially those historical buildings that representing the landmark for a country. As such, assessment of building structural concrete health, especially the concrete cracks are crucial for ensuring the safety and health of the building as cracks are among the earliest symptoms of concrete structure degradation. Therefore, non-destructive geotechnical technique was introduced in this study to determine the physical conditions of the concrete and visual examination was conducted for results verification purposes. In doing this, experiment was conducted by exerting hydraulic load on a reinforced concrete beam to produce cracks in precast concrete beam. Then, the common used non-destructive electromagnetic (EM) device, ground penetrating radar (GPR) with 2 GHz high frequency bi-polar antenna was employed to scan the reinforced concrete beam to detect cracks. After that, visual inspection was conducted for validation of concrete cracks on the beam. The high similarity in the radar profile obtained by GPR and numerical model proved the advantages of utilizing non-destructive technique for inspection of building structural health, where the inner structure of the concrete can be taken into granted as well in the future through refinement of the results of this study. With such new benchmark, it opens up new application for GPR in civil infrastructure maintenance and management