NDT assessment of rigid pavement damages with ground penetrating radar: laboratory and field tests

A Review of GPR Application on Transport Infrastructures: Troubleshooting and Best Practices

“…On-site measurements compared with cores highlight that clear images of cracks in the B-scans correspond to large fissures (several centimeters wide), in many cases filled with foreign material [42,56]. Early fissures are not visible in GPR images because the anomaly is masked with the anomalies produced in the grains and heterogeneities of the layers [66].…”

“…GPR is also applied in the assessment of rigid pavements, with one of the main objectives being the identification of metal bars and layers thickness [54], and measuring the rebar cover depth [55]. The assessment to detect damage such as cracking and voids is another application in rigid pavements [41,42], [56]. These studies are mainly focused on the detection of damage areas, but in some cases the origin of the damage is also investigated, including the effect of roots in pavements [57] and the impact of weather and load conditions.…”

“…• Detection of cracks and voids under the pavement, including the analysis of possible causes (weather, loads, roots, etc.) [40,56,57,[64][65][66][67][68]. • Quality control of asphalt, mainly in the case of new pavement [69][70][71][72].…”

“…• Analysis of new road alignments, studying the ground materials and the depth to the bedrock and to the water table, reaching in some cases a depth of about 5 m. • Assessment of existing roads in order to detect filling materials [86], voids or weak zones under the pavement [40,56,[64][65][66][67][68]. • Quality control of restorations [69][70][71][72].…”

“…Many works are devoted to laboratory tests and controlled measurements in order to determine the limits in the detection of cracks. The laboratory tests described by [56] in specimens representing rigid pavements are focused on detecting the bottom of the cracks depending on its width, length, and filling material. The results conclude that it is possible to detect 2 mm wide cracks, and the presence of material filling the crack increases its detectability, being possible to determine the bottom of the cracks: (i) wider than 5 mm and filled with saturated sand; and (ii) wider than 15 mm and filled with dry sand.…”