Efficient air-launched ground-penetrating radar inspections in a large-scale road network

Nowadays, financial resources for maintenance have certainly decreased in many fields of application due to the Global Economic Crisis. In this context, the need for high performing inspections in pavement engineering has become a priority, and the use of non-destructive techniques has increased. In that respect, ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is proving to be as one of the most promising tools for retrieving both physical and geometrical properties of pavements. In this study, an off-ground GPR system, 1-GHz centre frequency of investigation, was used for surveying a large-scale rural road network. Data processing was aimed to accurately identify the geometry of pavement layer interfaces. Results showed the high effectiveness and efficiency of such GPR system and procedure. The high productivity, approximately 160 km/day, along with the capability to identify mismatches in layers arrangement, even in case of undisclosed defects, demonstrated the importance of such technique in road inspections