Non-Destructive Monitoring Strategies of Historical Constructions and Tangible Culturale Heritage Based on Ground-Based Sar Interferometry

Abstract

Tangible cultural heritage, historical buildings and bridges have an important cultural significance and economic value within the tourism industry and the identity of local communities. The preservation and the assessment of their structural health are important issues which call for multidisciplinary teams and non-invasive monitoring techniques due the uniqueness and historical values of these man-made structures. Numerical models used to study the structural behavior of these historical buildings and bridges under different adverse conditions (e.g. intense traffic flow, natural hazard events, chemical pollution or simply aging) can benefit from accurate measurements of mechanical properties such as displacements and vibration frequencies, both bringing information about the static and dynamical behavior of such historical constructions. This work presents some results of structural monitoring of man-made structures by Ground-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (GBSAR) interferometry techniques. A ku-band GBSAR interferometer is used to derive displacement maps of the monitored target, with a sub-millimeter precisions. Furthermore, GBSAR interferometry is used to measure vibration frequencies of vertical and horizontal structures, such bell towers, towers, bridges and historical walls. The main advantage of this technique is its capability to operate in any weather and sun-illumination condition, in a truly Non-Destructive Monitoring (NDM) approach, i.e. without installing any reflector on the observed target.

TLS and GB-RAR Measurements of Vibration Frequencies and Oscillation Amplitudes of Tall Structures: An Application to Wind Towers

“…A spectral analysis of the stack of range vectors {R P,GB-RAR (t)} P TOWER , results in the 2D spectrum of the vibration frequencies. This procedure has been described in [18] and applied to the monitoring of bell-towers and monuments in [30]. An important step of the adaption of the estimation of the GB-RAR estimation of vibration frequencies to the study of the characterization of the dynamical properties of a wind tower is the co-registration of TLS and GB-RAR spectra as sketched in Figure 6.…”

Assessing the Impact of the 2023 Kahramanmaras Earthquake on Cultural Heritage Sites Using High-Resolution SAR Images

“…The system combines high-resolution structure listing information with maps of the intensity of earthquake ground shaking and surface-level changes determined by analyzing before-and after-event InSAR pictures. Gionanni et al [11] used a ground-based SAR interferometric technique to monitor man-made cultural heritage sites and used a Ku-band GBSAR interferometer to generate a deformation map. Tapete and Cigna [12] relied on the properties and capabilities of COSMO-SkyMed for the environmental monitoring of land surface processes, and condition assessment of archaeological heritage and landscape disturbance due to anthropogenic impacts.…”