Ground Penetrating Radar applications for roads and airport pavements investigations

The R.Ex. system constitutes an acquisition device aimed at obtaining a huge amount of high quality GPR data in a relatively short time. Furthermore, the integration and joining of multy-frequency antennas is essential to obtain high resolution in the shallower portion of paved roads and detailed information down to 2-3 m below the topographic surface. The methodology described in this work allows to achieve the information that are important for a traffic infrastructure company before maintenance operations planning and after new roads contructions. In Case-1-Test site-1 the interpretation of inhomogeneities of the subgrade let to locate the critical failure points and drive for future maintenance activities; Case-1-Test site 2 and Case 2 report the surveys after pavement and construction works, that has been used as a sort of verification of the layers thicknesses and its analyses between the cores. Future developments have to be addressed to the improvement in the precision (and the speed) of picking horizons. In this regard, a picking method was recently implemented and tested in different fields of application (Forte et al., 2013; Dossi et al., 2015a) including pavements (Dossi et al., 2015b, 2015c). The obtained results are encouraging allowing to achieve a faster and more accurate picking, diminishing at the same time the subjectivity level of the interpretation.