In Situ Methods of Testing Stone Monuments and the Application of Nondestructive Physical Properties Testing in Masonry Diagnosis

Abstract

Rapid in situ diagnosis of monuments is a key issue in the preservation of heritage sites. Stone masonry diagnosis is aimed to analyse the condition of a stone structure or building in order to understand the causes of deterioration and to find an adequate treatment and optimal conservation method or management plan for a heritage site or building. These measurements can provide valuable data for maintenance, restoration or they could form the base line of “preventive conservation”. Due to the rapid development of measuring systems and the application of new methods and techniques from other fields (e.g., from the medical sciences) to masonry diagnosis, a wide range of techniques are available these days. The new methods such as portable spectroscopy units (Brunetti 2008 ), portable XRF (Thornbush and Viles 2006 ), combined XRD/XRF (Chiari 2008 ), X-ray tomography (Cnudde et al. 2009 ) or Light Detection And Ranging scanners ( LiDAR, Meneely et al. 2008 ) and many other methods can revolutionize monument diagnosis in the future. Nevertheless, the widespread application of some of these new techniques is now hampered by their high costs and therefore in daily practice simpler and cheaper tools and methods are applied in masonry diagnosis. This chapter will describe both these new, expensive techniques and the older and generally cheaper equipments and methods of stone masonry diagnosis, focusing on testing physical parameters in particular.