Application of Ground Penetrating Radar in Inspection and Monitoring

Abstract

In the North America’s municipalities, every year there are many deep trunk sewer systems that are approaching or exceeding their design service life. Inspection and monitoring of urban waste water infrastructure which is mostly buried underground is difficult and complicated resulting in infrequent maintenance visitations and costly sewer system rehabilitations. The alternative to crisis management is continuous condition monitoring, data analysis, modeling and planning. Hatch has designed, developed and commissioned a sewer inspection system based on the ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology to evaluate the condition of deep trunk sanitary sewer systems. The system is capable of inspecting both cast-in-place and pre-cast concrete sewers and has been successfully tested in both brand new and under operation sewers.

This paper describes our GPR based sewer inspection and monitoring system and demonstrates its capabilities through the two case studies.