BUILDING CONCRETE CRACKS DETECTION USING IMAGE-BASED NONDESTRUCTIVE GEOTECHNICAL TECHNIQUE

摘要

Buildings need to be maintained regularly throughout the entire of their operational life in order to extend their service lives. The building structural health monitoring system is produced to prevent the occurring of hazardous incident. However, the health information of these buildings are not being recorded and reported by the construction and building industry although it is crucial for building structure monitoring, maintenance and rehabilitation. Hence, issue of deterioration of building concrete structure in recent years had become an alarming issue that highlighted extensively throughout the world. As such, assessment of building concrete structure health, particularly the concrete cracks is crucial for ensuring the safety and health of the building as cracks are among the earliest symptoms of concrete structure degradation. Therefore, non-destructive geotechnical technique was introduced in this study to determine the physical conditions of the concrete structure for building and visual examination was conducted for results verification purposes. In doing this, experiment was conducted by exerting hydraulic load on a reinforced concrete beam to produce cracks in precast concrete beam. Then, the common used non-destructive electromagnetic (EM) device, ground penetrating radar (GPR) with 2 GHz high frequency bi-polar antenna was employed to scan the reinforced concrete beam to detect cracks. After that, visual inspection was conducted for validation of concrete cracks on the beam. Results of the study contributed main finding where the high similarity in the radar profile obtained by GPR and numerical model can trace the "safe buffer zone" for building structure maintenance work; very crucial aspects in monitoring of structural health for buildings, particularly those buildings that supporting human and economic activities, transportation and a collection of buildings that make up of urban and rural communities.