Characterization of textile effects on concrete panel using synthetic aperture radar imaging

Abstract

In recent years, textiles are used as a structural material in externally strengthening/retrofitting deteriorated and damaged concrete structures. Formation of externally strengthened/retrofitted concrete structures creates a new type of multi-layer dielectric system for their condition assessment using non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques. The objective of this paper is to investigate the use of microwave/radar NDE on a one-layer textileconcrete system for condition assessment. In this paper, we use a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging system at 10 GHz to study the effect of an externally attached textile layer on the SAR images of two concrete panels. One type of textile was used on a 30.48 cm by 30.48 cm by 2.54 cm concrete panels to form a one-layer textileconcrete system. Various ranges (20 cm, 30 cm, 40 cm, 50 cm and 60 cm) were considered. Our experiment results demonstrated that the SAR imaging can successfully distinguish the type of textiles. Furthermore, it was found that electromagnetic pattern of the textile layer varies with range in SAR images. Empirical models were developed to characterize the range effect on the SAR images by using textile applied on concrete panels.