Abstract:
Inspection is one of the most important activities in maintenance concrete structures. Frequently, positions of rebars and cover thickness have to be checked and measured during the inspection. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and covermeter are selected due to its high penetrating capability and faster-scanning speed. However, many existing methods to estimate the depth of buried object (rebar, steel pipe, etc.) need to know the actual radius of buried object to estimate the depth with high accuracy. This study presents effects of the diameter of rebars to estimate cover thickness on GPR data and effects of a lap splice on GPR data and Covermeter. Two topics are presented ; 1) This study presents a new method mainly focusing on automatically searching the locations of rebars in RC structures (cover thickness) by using ground penetrating radar measurement data based on the modified existing hyperbolic signatures model. A comparison of the proposed method with the conventional method and the existing hyperbolic signatures method shows that the proposed method is significantly more accurate and capable of estimating cover thickness with an average accuracy of 3.12\%. The results from the proposed method and the existing hyperbolic signatures method indicates that the assumption of zero radius of the rebar, for the rebar diameter not over 32 mm, does not significantly affect the estimated cover thickness. 2) A method to detect a lap splice and to estimate a summation of a diameter of the two rebars of the lap splice in reinforced concrete based on a combined utilization of covermeter and GPR is proposed. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the case that only one instrument is employed. The results shows that the proposed method can detect the overlapping direction of the lap splice and estimate the summation of the diameter of the two rebars with an average accuracy of 2.35\% and standard error of estimate of 1.34 mm.
Thammasat University. Thammasat University Library