Assessment of Cracking Widths in a Concrete Wall Based on TIR Radiances of Cracking

The techniques of concrete crack detection, as well as assessments based on thermography coupled with ultrasound, have been presented in many works; however, they have generally needed an additional source of thermal infrared (TIR) radiance and have only been applied in laboratories. Considering the accessibility of thermal infrared cameras, a TIR camera (NEC F30W) was employed to detect cracking in the concrete wall of an historic house with a western architectural style in Kinmen, Taiwan, based on the TIR radiances of cracking. An operation procedure involving a series of image processing and statistical analysis processes was designed to evaluate the performance of the TIR camera in the assessment of the cracking width. This procedure using multiple measurements was implemented from March to August 2019, and the t-tests indicated that the temperature differences between the inside and outline of the concrete cracks remained insignificant as the temperature or relative humidity (RH) in the subtropical climate rose. The experimental results of the operation procedure indicated that the maximum focusing range, which is related to the size of the sensor array, and the minimum detectable crack width of a TIR camera should be 1.0 m and 6.0 mm, respectively, in order to derive a linear regression model with a determination coefficient R² of 0.733 to estimate the cracking widths, based on the temperature gradients. The validation results showed that there was an approximate R² value of 0.8 and a total root mean square error of ±2.5 mm between the cracking width estimations and the observations.