Non-destructive approach for the generation and thermal characterization of an as-built BIM

• Methodology for generating as-built BIMs with descriptive data of building elements.
• Non-destructive techniques applied to thermal and geometric inspection of buildings.
• Automatic point cloud processing for the generation of the geometry of BIM.
• Quantitative thermography approach for the calculation of U-values of the enclosure.

Building Information Models are being increasingly accepted as containers and managers of data during the lifecycle of buildings, given their capacity of associating the descriptive data available, such as the physical properties of the materials, with the 3D representation of the building. In the case of existing buildings, as-built BIMs have to be created, and non-destructive techniques are required to acquire all the information needed provoking no disruption or change to the building. In this work, the as-built BIM of a facility is created through the semi-automated processing of a laser scanning point cloud and enriched with the different U-values of the enclosure. This thermophysical property is obtained for the construction as-is through an energy balance using temperature values measured with a thermographic camera. The resulting as-built BIM is defined according to the gbXML language, which was especially created to be used in analysis of the performance of the building.