Aplicabilidade da termografia infravermelha em revestimentos asfálticos

Abstract

In Brazil the early deterioration of asphalt pavements is a constant concern, the being the main defects cracking and rutting. There are several techniques for the detection of these defects, but the majority is only applicable to defects in advanced stage and with surface manifestations, not having an adequate methodology for the monitoring of the installation of the defect so that a solution of restoration is proposed more with lower costs. Infrared thermography is a technique of non-contact temperature measurement, which is frequently used in the investigation of pathological manifestations of civil construction and its application to asphalt paving is still little explored. This study aimed to analyze some applications of this technique in asphalt pavements. First, parametric analysis were performed with the FLIR T400 thermal camera in order to understand the importance of the main parameters in thermal imaging. Before the field study, tests were performed on asphalt samples with induced cracks of known diameters and locations. The purpose of these tests was to analyze how the heat distribution occurs throughout the sample, in order to find temperature differences in the fault regions, and then thermal images of the asphalt pavement were obtained. In addition, in this work the applicability of a maximum temperature prediction model of asphalt pavement developed in the state of Rio Grande do Sul was verified. With the analysis of the thermal images of the asphaltic samples, it was noticed that there is a trend of behavior change thermograms in regions with faults and defects. As for the model, it was possible to observe that a good agreement of the measured and predicted temperatures, provided that the temperature range that makes it valid is respected.