Imaging radar for bridge deck inspection

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is developing a prototype imaging radar for inspecting steel reinforced concrete bridge decks. The system is designed to acquire synthetic aperture radar data and provide high-resolution images of internal structure, flaws, and defects enabling bridge inspectors to nondestructively evaluate and characterized bridge deck condition. Concrete delamination resulting from corrosion of steel reinforcing bars (rebars) is an important structural defect that the system is designed to detect. The prototype system uses arrays of compact, low-cost micropower impulse radar (MIR) modules, supported by appropriate data acquisition and storage subsystems, to generate and collect the radar data, and unique imaging codes to reconstruct images of bridge deck internals. In this paper, we provide an overview of the prototype system concept, discuss its expected performance, and present recent experimental results showing the capability of this approach to detect thin delamination simulations embedded in concrete.