Nondestructive testing assists the assessment of old retaining walls made of natural stonework

摘要

During the last twelve years a rating system has been developed at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts for the assessment of old retaining walls made of natural stonework. Up to now this rating system has been applied successfully in several projects. The goal of this rating system is to assess the as-is state of old retaining walls as well as their constructiveness. Unfortunately, in many cases there is no information available about the design and construction details. Therefore a research project has been carried out to evaluate the possible contribution of nondestructive testing for the investigation of the constructiveness of such walls. In this project different methods have been used with acoustic and electromagnetic waves. Data were acquired with those different methods on a test wall with a length of approximately 5 m and a height of 1.8 m. In addition, data were acquired on an existing old retaining wall on a Swiss pass road. The test results show that the selection of a test method for those old retaining walls made of natural stonework is highly dependent on the type of masonry of the retaining wall.