Detection of damages and failures in special buildings

Historical buildings like churches, cathedrals and other cultural heritage monuments require special and continuous attention for their conservation. The required restorations need the information obtained using different methodologies. Like other complementary techniques, the geophysical prospecting allows to study different problems from different points of view. GPR studies performed in special buildings allow detecting voids in the walls, humid zones and fissures in constructive materiais. In fact, this methodology can detect anomalous areas, where there are problems. Different problems studied in special buildings, in areas where the damages were known, let us to identify humidity problems (strong reflections), voids into the walls (small reflections appearing usually in the materials between the rocks and in the contact between the different constructive elements or epochs), and fissures. AIso, radar data shows the existence of different anomalies near the building: structures underneath the studied one, small movements and settlements, and old wells, canals or another kind of water conduction buried nowadays that can cause the hurnidity or the settlement problems; deformations of the strata under the construction, etc. The examples reported here were obtained from measurements performed in areas with important hurnidity (efflorescences and detachment caused by water), with important deformations or in zones where the constructions were built in different epochs and different materiais. The differences between the damaged and nondamaged are as are clearly observed in the radar data interpretations.