The most common application of a cover meter is to measure the distance between the concrete surface and the closest face of embedded reinforcing steel bars, the cover depth.
Proceq cover meters will also act as rebar locators and include a limited capacity to estimate the rebar diameter of isolated reinforcing bars, this estimation should not be used in place of exposing a rebar to measure its diameter as there are many possible sources of interference with this measurement.
Other applications include locating the position of steel ties in masonry or brickwork and 2D and 3D visualisation of rebar layouts.
The depth measurement of a cover meter is very precise, typically ±1 mm of the real depth to a range of 40 mm. This accuracy is achievable when the user has correctly entered the reinforcing diameter from design information of physical bar measurements.
This procedure and webinar content explains the correct process to locate and measure individual bar cover depth.
Reinforcing diameter estimation may over or underestimate bar diameter size and should not be used as a measurement for quality control.
When a reinforcing bar diameter is not not available users may assume a minimum and maximum likely bar diameter and calculate the potential error manually from the manufacturers performance specifications as seen below.
Cover meters which use pulsed eddy current will respond to any metal within their electromagnetic field. When aligned correctly over single reinforcing bar they will correctly measure the cover depth to that bar.
Lapped reinforcing will measure the depth incorrectly and any other metallic target will be detected with an incorrect depth. Non-metallic rebar is not able to be detected with a cover meter, but may be located using ground penetrating radar.
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