Reliability of Crack Detection Methods for Baseline Condition Assessments
Publication: Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 16, Issue 2
Abstract
Despite billions of dollars of annual exposure from claims and litigation related to construction-induced damage, there are no quantitatively based, agreed upon standards or procedures as to what constitutes due diligence with respect to a preconstruction, condition assessment. Similarly, the relative accuracy, reliability, and costs for various inspection approaches are not well established. This paper compares the relative performance capabilities of crack detection by sidewalk-based manual inspection with digital photography, terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), and elevated manual inspections based on two brick and two concrete buildings (8.2–14.3 m high) in Dublin, Ireland. Results showed that nonmanual methods tended to overpredict crack widths by at least 5 mm and underestimate crack lengths by one-half. Digital photography, however, detected the shortest cracks (as short as 17 mm) and had no significant decline in accuracy beyond 12 m high, which has the added benefit of generating a permanent objective record. The terrestrial LiDAR proved neither particularly accurate nor cost-effective at the selected point density of less than . Finally, operator-based reliability problems emerged with all methods with discrepancies of at least 11%. Overall, digital photography taken and archived, but not analyzed, was the most cost-effective, accurate, and reliable approach.
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Acknowledgments
Support for this work was generously provided by Science Foundation Ireland Grant No. UNSPECIFIED05/PICA/I830 GUILD: Generating Urban Infrastructures from LiDAR Data. Additional thanks to Brian Kearon, Tom Deely, Tommy Hinks, and Donal Lennon for technical and logistical assistance.
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Received: Feb 21, 2008
Accepted: Jun 3, 2009
Published online: May 14, 2010
Published in print: Jun 2010
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