A three dimensional approach for tracking cracks in bridges using GPR

Corrosion associated with reinforcing bars is the most significant contributor to bridge deficiencies. The corrosion is usually caused by moisture and chloride ion exposure. The reinforcing bars are attacked by corrosion and yield expansive corrosion products. These oxidation products occupy a larger volume than the original intact steel and internal expansive stresses lead to cracking and debonding. There are some conventional inspection methods for the detection of the reinforcing bar's corrosion but they can be invasive and destructive, often laborious, and lane closure is required and it is difficult or unreliable for any quantification of corrosion. For these reasons, bridge engineers always prefer more to use the ground penetrating radar (GPR) technique. In this work a novel numerical approach for three dimensional tracking and mapping of cracks in the bridge is proposed. The work starts from some interesting results based on the use of the 3D imaging technique in order to improve the potentiality of the GPR to detect voids, cracks or buried objects. The numerical approach has been tested on data acquired on a bridge by using a pulse GPR system specifically designed for bridge deck and pavement inspection. The equipment integrates two arrays of Ultra Wide Band ground coupled antennas, having a main working frequency of 2. GHz. The two arrays are using antennas arranged with a different polarization. The cracks, associated often to moisture increase and higher values of the dielectric constant, produce a not negligible increase of the signal amplitude. Following this, the algorithm, organized in preprocessing, processing and postprocessing stages, analyzes the signal by comparing the value of the amplitude all over the domain of the radar scan