Nondestructive moisture mapping from basement walls with high-frequency GPR

There is an increasing demand for reliable moisture monitoring techniques for building structures since the number of health problems related to high moisture levels in structures has been growing. Ground Penetrating Radar is an NDT technique with great potential in this area and has seen more use in these types of surveys. This paper presents a case history where GPR measurements were performed using a commercial 2.6 GHz center frequency ground-coupled GPR system in a residential basement made of lightweight aggregate blocks and suffering from moisture problems. The moisture maps calculated from the processed GPR data demonstrate that a high-frequency GPR can be successfully used to map wet areas in detail as well as areas that are not damaged by the moisture. The survey results were also verified using capacitance based dielectric probes.