CONDITION EVALUATION OF CONCRETE BRIDGE DECKS BY USING GPR

Concrete decks are vulnerable to cracking by various factors such as thermal and dry shrinkage under construction. And they are directly exposed to traffic loads and environmental conditions like rain water and deicing chemicals causing the freeze-thaw action and rebar corrosion during their service life. For this reason, bridge deck deterioration is a major problem for highway agencies and is one of the leading contributors to the number of deficient bridges. Traditional methods of condition assessment on bridge decks have been achieved by visual inspection and drilled cores. Conventional techniques are, however, slow, labor-intensive, intrusive to traffic, and unreliable. As a result of these limitations, the new technique which can provide rapid and accurate condition assessment for bridge decks has been needed. In this study, the usefulness of ground penetrating radar(GPR) by means of assessing deck data (pavement thickness, top concrete cover, deck thickness, and dielectric constants of concrete decks, etc) was tested on a highway bridge. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E204151.