Ground penetrating radar and microwave tomography 3D applications for the deck evaluation of the Musmeci bridge in Potenza, Italy

An extensive experimental and numerical investigation has been carried out to assess the status of the 'Ponte sul Basento' (1967–1976), in the town of Potenza (Basilicata region, southern Italy), better known as the Musmeci bridge. Architecturally, the bridge is a considerable reinforced 20th century concrete structure that was designed and built by the Italian architect Sergio Musmeci (1926–1981). Moreover, the bridge represents an important element of the infrastructural network, linking the city centre to the Potenza-Sicignano highway, crossing the Basento river and the railway close to the main train station of the city. Recently, due to ageing and continuous and significant traffic, the bridge started to be affected by several problems such as water infiltration. Within the presented study, a widespread ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey has been designed to investigate the geometrical characteristics of the bridge deck (Gerber saddles, internal stiffening walls, pillar supports) and detect the presence of defects or damage due to water infiltration and traffic fatigue. Concerning this, a 900 MHz 3D GPR survey has been performed along a zone of one of the lanes on the road surface. Moreover, a second 1500 MHz 3D survey has been carried out at the bottom of the bridge deck in order to gain detailed information about an important structural element of the bridge, the Gerber saddle. Both results have been processed following two approaches: the first a classical time-domain processing session based on commercial software and the use of migration; the second in microwave tomography, an advanced frequency domain automatic PC-based inversion algorithm. In this paper, we present a comparative interpretation of both kinds of processed results, and provide considerations about the investigated structures.