Locating Hidden Elements in Walls of Cultural Heritage Buildings by Using Infrared Thermography

Abstract

The structure of Tvrđa and its buildings date back to the Middle Ages. Tvrđa represents the Old Town of the city of Osijek and the best-preserved and largest ensemble of Baroque buildings in Croatia. After the withdrawal of the Ottomans in 1687, during the 18th century, the Austro-Hungarian administration systematically formed a new fortification system, regulated streets and squares and built a large number of military objects. Tvrđa took its present form in the 19th century and has kept it since then. Investigating the historical development of individual buildings, in addition to archival sources and existing architectural documentation, the obvious source of information are the buildings themselves. The aim of this paper is to explore the possibilities of using infrared thermography to find structural elements and hidden openings in historic buildings in Osijek's Tvrđa. This paper describes the exploration of the 18th century openings on the facades of the former Kostić houses. The facades were bricked into the walls in the 19th century because houses were reused and their purposes changed from commercial to residential. Infrared thermography is often a starting, nondestructive testing method (NDT) for building analyses. This paper presents thermographic analyses of two buildings. The analyses were carried out in December 2017 and January 2018. Using a steady-state thermographic analysis of a building envelope as the first step, the audit was continued with step heating (SH) of an interest point where changes in a thermal pattern were expected due to additional bricking. Heat flux was generated by the usage of a heat gun for paint removal.

Combining InfraRed Thermography and UAV Digital Photogrammetry for the Protection and Conservation of Rupestrian Cultural Heritage Sites in Georgia: A Methodological Application

“…IRT, given the portability and the fast acquisition and processing times of thermographic data, can be profitably applied for mapping criticalities in the field of tangible CH conservation [76][77][78]. In Vardzia the obtained ST maps allowed to map the moisture sectors in correspondence to the large sub-vertical open fractures orthogonal to the valley, and where the main streams cut the whole breccia level.…”

Verification of a Nondestructive Method for Assessing the Humidity of Saline Brick Walls in Historical Buildings

“…The problem of excessive moisture in brick walls usually concerns old buildings that have been used for several dozen years or more [1][2][3][4][5][6]. A special group of such old buildings concerns those that are included in the register of monuments and those that are subjected to special conservation protection.…”

Thermal and spatial data integration for recreating rebuilding stages of wooden and masonry buildings

“…Infrared (IR) thermography is often used for documenting the detection of damage to heritage buildings and sites (Nikzad et al, 2011). One of the most interesting applications involves investigations into finding elements that differ on seemingly identical building structures (Glavaš et al, 2019). This is usually done in order to find voids, passages or just parts of the object that underwent rebuilding or reconstruction in the past (Spodek and Rosina, 2009).…”

“…The building is required to be heated overnight and the thermal image series is taken in the early morning when the contrast with outside is at its greatest. This allows for the detection of the areas on the building's surface that discharge the most heat (Tran et al, 2017;Glavaš et al, 2019). This procedure allows the pinpointing of areas that are not sufficiently isolated and need to be inspected further.…”