CONTRIBUTION OF RADAR INSPECTIONS TO THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE STATE OF CIVIL ENGINEERING WORKS

Civil engineering works age and degrade over time. In the context of sustainable development and from both economic and environmental perspectives, it is often more advantageous to rehabilitate existing structures than building new ones. There comes the necessity of expertise in order to gain a thorough knowledge of their state of deterioration, the extent and causes of such deterioration, their residual lifetime, etc. In this line, the radar, a non-destructive testing method, emerges as the most appropriate research instrument in that it does not affect the structure of the works examined. However, this instrument is uncommonly used. That is why the present paper aims at contributing its popularization through the assessment of the state of some civil engineering works based on specific data derived from non-destructive measurements made with the radar.