Challenge
Evaluation of seismic vulnerability of a reinforced concrete building supported by geophysical investigations. The City of Messina was hit by a destructive earthquake (Magnitude > 7) occurred in 1908, only very few buildings survived. In the following years, extensive urban redevelopment took place employing reinforced concrete construction methods. As the area is one the most seismic in Italy, building health checks and seismic vulnerability assessment are mandatory: different non-intrusive methods were investigated for these purposes.
Project
Instruments
MALA Concrete Explorer, 2.3 GHz GPR antenna, ReflexW (Sandmeier K. J.) for data processing
Purpose
Evaluation of seismic vulnerability of a reinforced concrete building
Study
Seismic vulnerability assessment at different scales and structural diagnostic procedures. Davide Campo’s Master of Science Thesis in Applied Geophysics.
Solution
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) was chosen to image the reinforced structure due to its high level of details, speed in data collection and real time imaging that allows preliminary analyses. The system used for the survey consists of a Mala GPR system with a 2.3 GHz central frequency designed for structural surveys.
Results
- Point/trace interval: 4 mm
- Profile spacing: 10 cm
- Time zero correction;
- Bandpass filtering;
- Time gain
- Background removal;
- Kirchoff migration (0.12 m/ns).
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Davide Campo for sharing this case and allowing us to publish it.
See all of Davide Campo’s publications here
