Rough thin pavement thickness estimation by GPR

Nicolas Pinel (1) , Cédric Le Bastard (2) , Limei Liu (3) , Christophe Bourlier (1) , Yide Wang (1)

1 IREENA - Institut de Recherche en Energie Electrique de Nantes Atlantique EA4642
2 CETE Ouest - Centre d'études techniques de l'équipement Ouest
3 Research institute of Intelligent system and movement control

In civil engineering, usually the methods used to estimate the thickness of thin pavements consider flat interfaces for simplification. In this paper, the roughness of the surfaces is taken into account. First, the amplitudes of the first two echoes from the rough thin pavement are calculated from a rigorous electromagnetic method, the PILE method. A comparison is then made with the flat interface case, and their differences in the electromagnetic backscattering are highlighted. Eventually, the influence of the pavement roughness on the pavement thickness estimation is investigated by using the Maximum Likelihood Method.

Keywords: Radar scattering; Electromagnetic scattering by rough surfaces; Ground wave propagation; Nondestructive testing; Delay estimation; Radar scattering

Domains: Electromagnetism

Nicolas Pinel, Cédric Le Bastard, Limei Liu, Christophe Bourlier, Yide Wang. Rough thin pavement thickness estimation by GPR. International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, Jul 2009, Le Cap (Cape Town), South Africa. pp.1255. ⟨hal-00426435⟩