Accuracy of Ground Penetrating Radar Horn-Antenna Technique for Sensing Pavement Subsurface

Abstract

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is an intelligent sensor technique that has led to a powerful nondestructive testing (NDT) method for road pavement evaluation. Recent improvements in hardware and, in particular, software processing have contributed to the rapidly expanding popularity and usability of this technique in the pavement engineers community. In the present work, a GPR sensor system mounted on a driving van was used to acquire data from an asphalt pavement. Two different central frequency air-coupled horn antennas were used for data acquisition. The collected radar data was processed and analyzed in order for the accuracy of the antennas to be evaluated. For this purpose, the asphalt layer dielectric values and related thickness values were also estimated. Based on the GPR data analysis results, the performance of the two horn antennas in terms of sensing pavement subsurface is presented and discussed in the paper