Boundary and size estimation of debonds in external wall finishes of high-rise buildings using Infrared thermography

This paper reports an infrared thermography (IRT) application on boundary and size estimation of debonds in rendered composites in high rise residential buildings. The application comprises the use of the traditional passive infrared thermography method, digitizing the infrared images to linear gray-scale, and processing the pixel array using a simple spatial pixel differentiation algorithm. The validity of the methodology was verified by comparing the estimation with the actual examination of the debonds and the error was found to be less than 16%.