An experimental study of the effects of climate conditions on thermography and pavement assessment

This paper presents a testing set-up that helps to observe and quantify the effects of different weather conditions on the thermal profiles related to the surface crack on concrete infrastructures. The temperature data for this research are generated using infrared thermography (IRT). IRT is prominently used to monitor surface and close-to-surface defects on pavements. However, the method is more prone to adverse effects of weather conditions compared to other types of nondestructive tests. This is because IRT relies on the temperature profile of the surface of the target. In this research, a full laboratory study is conducted to experimentally quantify the effects of weather conditions and surface coating on the ability of IRT to assess surface cracks on concrete pavements. The goal is to determine the significance of these effects on IRT under each weather condition. IRT technology can be affected by critical environmental conditions, such as sunlight, ambient temperature variation, wind speed and humidity. Many research studies have mentioned the importance of the effect of weather conditions, but no research is dedicated to experimentally quantifying the effect. Around 90 different tests have been conducted from which 1050 unique data points have been extracted. Eventually, around 1,260,000 temperature data have been gathered which gives a huge dataset will give us the opportunity to do several statistical analyses. It is found that wind has a higher effect on the temperature of the crack on concrete pavements compared to humidity in the air. Even though both wind and humidity can affect the temperature of the crack, the different wind speeds and humidity levels have roughly the same amount of effect on the temperature.