Infrared thermography and geophysical techniques in cultural heritage conservation

Infrared thermography is a powerful tool of nondestructive evaluation, but it has some limitations when dealing with deep and low thermal resistance defects. This is the case of thick walls of historic buildings and buried anthropic remains, which are important tasks of the cultural heritage field. Thus, it is evident the need of relatively high-depth inspection techniques such as the geophysical ones. The main purpose of this study was to characterize the overlapping zone from low-to-high depth with infrared thermography and geophysical methods. The investigation was carried out on two-component structures including a plaster layer over a support of marble, brick, or tuff with plaster detachments intentionally created. Results prove that an integrated use of the two techniques allows for detailed evaluation of architectonic structures and provides information about the related causes of degradation.