CIVIL ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS OF GROUND PENETRATING RADAR

by Dr. A. Giannopoulos, this volume collects five papers written by WG3 Members. The paper by Dr. C. Ponti focuses on the state of the art and open issues in the development of full-wave methods for the solution of forward electromagnetic scattering problems by buried structures. A further paper by Prof. R. Solimene and Dr. A. Randazzo, instead, focuses on inverse electromagnetic scattering problems by buried structures. Next, the paper by Prof. S. Lambot concerns the development of intrinsic models for the description of near-field antenna effects, including antenna-medium coupling, for improved radar data processing using full-wave inversion. The paper by Dr. I. Catapano and Prof. E. Slob makes the point on shapereconstruction and quantitative estimation of electromagnetic and physical properties from GPR data. Finally, the paper by Dr. N. Economou, Prof. A. Vafidis, and Dr. F. Benedetto, provides the reader with a deep understanding of the state of the art and open issues in the field of GPR data processing techniques. The Working Group 4 (WG4) of COST Action TU1208 focuses on different applications of GPR and on other Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) techniques for civil engineering applications. Besides the abovementioned abstract by Dr. I. Trinks, this volume includes four papers written by WG4 Members. The paper by F. Soldovieri is concerned with a review of the recent advances related to the use of GPR, and its integration with other NDT techniques, in the applicative domain of the archaeological prospecting and cultural heritage diagnostics and monitoring; the main scientific/technological challenges are identified and possible strategies to tackle them are devised with a particular interest to the role that the COST Action TU1208 could play. The paper by Dr. L. Crocco and Prof. V. Ferrara addresses a challenging and emerging field of application of GPR, namely the localization of buried or trapped people, possibly exploiting the detection of the Doppler frequency changes induced by their physiological movements as heartbeat and breathing; the main motivations for which the topic is worth to be considered in the framework of the COST Action TU1208 are TUD COST Action TU1208 Civil Engineering Applications of Ground Penetrating Radar 6 outlined and an overview of some relevant literature is provided. The paper by Dr. M. Solla focuses on the use of GPR combined with other NDT methods in the surveying of transport infrastructures: published works in roads and pavements, concrete and masonry structures, and tunnel testing, are resumed. In geotechnical and geological tasks, the efficiency of GPR is strongly dependent on the site conditions, mostly due to the limited in-depth penetration and target discrimination: the paper by Dr. K. Dimitriadis and Dr. V. Perez-Gracia resumes the state of the art in this field and discusses how future research has to be oriented in order to improve the application of GPR and other NDT techniques in geotechnical and geological applications. We sincerely thank COST for funding the COST Action TU1208 and the First Action’s General Meeting. We deeply thank “Roma Tre” University for hosting this event and for providing facilities. We are also grateful to IDS Ingegneria dei Sistemi SpA for covering the printing costs of this