A multidisciplinary non-destructive approach to analyze moisture in historic masonry structures: Integration of both field and synthetic GPR data generated from photogrammetric and infrared imaging

This work presents a multidisciplinary approach to detect moisture in ancient masonry bridges, which has proven as a valuable tool to support the preservation of such historic assets. For the evaluation, non-destructive assessment was considered by means of ground-penetrating radar (GPR), photogrammetry and infrared thermography. Because of the inner heterogeneity of masonry structures, the analysis and interpretation of field GPR data resulted complex. Sophisticated finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modelling was therefore used to assist and to improve in the interpretation of the field data. Simulations were elaborated using a mixed model of parallelization, and more realistic and large scale models were built from the accurate data provided by photogrammetric and thermographie procedures.