Ground Penetrating Radar (Mala Geoscience)

MALA is the global leader in the design and manufacture of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) systems and Alpha Geoscience is their agent in Australia and New Zealand.  MALA provide high quality, reliable and easy to use equipment to solve your subsurface investigation needs. 

With over 70-years of professional experience, MALA have developed a versatile range of products that offer solutions across a broad range of applications.  From non-destructive testing (NDT), concrete imaging, utility detection and mapping to geophysical investigations, including Borehole, MALA has a GPR solution for you. 

Alpha offers detailed advice regarding the optimal equipment for your GPR application and can provide sales, rental, training and repair of all MALA instruments.

Innovation & Ease of Use

MALA is an innovative company that is committed to bring to market products that provide solutions at affordable prices, and in conjunction with Alpha, to support those products with quality service. 

Through its continuous product development MALA consistently leads the field in introducing new and often unique features and functions that are both practical and easy to use.

Concrete Investigation

Construction professionals involved in the cutting, coring or drilling of concrete structure require a safe and reliable means of inspecting work areas to locate and identify hidden features that could cause damage to machinery, or pose a danger to the operator or the structure itself during these activities. 

MALA’s range of high frequency antennas offers the best imaging solution with the highest resolution available. These high frequency antennas offer a reliable and non-destructive way of gathering subsurface information accurately, efficiently and in real time, for both metallic and non-metallic features such as rebar, conduits, wiring, plastic pipes, post-tension cables, voids and more. 

Main applications within the Concrete market:

• Concrete inspection – locating metallic and non-metallic targets in ceilings, floors and walls, i.e. rebar, tension cables, conduits, PVC pipes and more
• Structure inspection – bridges, towers, tunnels, balconies, garages, decks, columns, slabs, 
  monuments
• Condition assessment – map concrete condition for rehab planning
• Measure slab thickness
• Void location

Mala CX11 Concrete Imaging System

The CX11 Concrete Imaging System scans concrete structures simply and safely and present data clearly for real-time and in-the-box data acquisition, display and analysis. 

The Mala CX11 System allows the accurate inspection of concrete structure such as floors, walls, balconies, bridge decks etc. and the detection of metallic and non metallic objects and features within, i.e. rebar, post tension cables, metallic/ non-metallic conduits and pipes, voids and the measurement of slab thickness. 

Applications include:

• Cutting
• Coring
• Drilling
• Inspection and
• Quality Control

The CX11 System comes as standard in a Shipping Case, but can also be used in conjunction with an optional PC/Monitor holder for greater portability and flexibility of use, depending on the application and user requirements. 

The CX11 System fully supports MALA's range of High Frequency (HF) Shielded Antennas allowing the user to choose the best antenna for their given application and obtain unsurpassed accuracy and data clarity.

Mala Professional Explorer (ProEx) System

The ProEx system is a truly modular and lightweight full-range Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) system designed to meet the needs of the advanced professional user. At the heart of this new system is the ProEx Control Unit. Designed on a completely new technical platform, the ProEx is the most versatile control unit in the MALA range. 

The interchangeable features of the ProEx make it available as a single or dual-channel system in the basic configuration or a true multi-channel system with the optional expansion units. The ProEx is fully compatible with all MALA antennas, offering configurations between 25 MHz to 2.3 GHz, with up to 16 simultaneous recording channels.

Ethernet communications between the ProEx and the XV Monitor or a notebook PC ensure safe and reliable data transfer at high speed.  Depending on the configuration and the antennas used, the ProEx can perform various measurements, including standard reflection surveys, tomography, or velocity (CMP) measurements.

Mala Shielded Antennas

Shielded antennas are designed for use in urban areas or sites with a lot of background noise. A shielded antenna consists of both transmitter and receiver antenna elements in a single housing. The design ensures that the transmitted radar energy is only emitted from the bottom of the antenna housing, where it is in contact with the ground and protects the receiver element from external signals (noise) from directions other than the bottom of the housing, where it is located. 

MALA’s shielded antennas are equipped with a pulling eye on the front of the housing for attaching tow handles or straps. 

A fastening block at the back of the housing allows connection of a distance-measuring wheel. The wheel operates as a triggering device instructing the radar system to collect traces at operator pre-set distant intervals. Removable skid/ wear plates protect the bottom of the antenna housing ensuring they last and thereby protect the user’s investment. 

Like all of MALA’s systems, the shielded antennas are modular by design. This means that antenna electronics, pulling devices and measuring wheels are compatible and interchangeable. 

This reduces the cost for owning or expanding a system.

Range of Shielded Antennas

Mala Rough Terrain Antennas

MALA’s Rough Terrain Antenna (RTA) concept changes the face of low-frequency Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) surveying. The unique in-line, all-in-one, antenna design provides improved performance for deeper penetration.  The flexible “snake” like design allows the antenna to be manoeuvred easily and efficiently through the densest or most uneven of terrain without affecting ground contact, providing optimum results in the most difficult of environments. 

The most important benefit being that the operator doesn’t have to clear an access path or route prior to the profile or survey. 

Even in relatively easy environments the RTA out performs the rest, with proven results showing a significant reduction in survey time and manpower costs. Existing users of the 50 MHz variant report reductions in survey time and man power requirements to a third of those experienced when using traditional unshielded antennas.

Brief Description & Technical Specification

Typical system set-up comprises a ProEx control unit mounted in a backpack, XV Monitor, RTA, rechargeable batteries and a triggering mechanism (survey wheel, hip chain, or time). 

The whole design is rated to IP67 and complies with the European ETSI EN 302 066-1 standard. 

Applications

The RTA series is recommended for deep geological layer investigations. Although, other applications include: glaciology, archaeological/ anthropological investigations, mapping of groundwater resources and depth to bedrock mapping. 

MIRA

MALA is the world leader in supplying imaging array GPR units.  The interest in these GPR array systems has increased rapidly over the last few years because of the growing need for high resolution 3D surveys.

The MALA MIRA System enables fast and true 3D data acquisition over large areas.  Since these large areas are mapped without any loss of information, this makes MIRA ideal for shallow subsurface investigations such as utility mapping, archaeological investigations and forensic examination.

Mala Imaging Radar Arrays (MIRA)

The MIRA system consists of a number of separate transmitter and receiver antennas combined into one single antenna array unit.  In operation, the antenna array is tracked and positioned by a robotic (self-tracking) total station or a RTK GPS for precise positioning.  This gives several parallel profiles exactly positioned at the same time, resulting in a seamless 3D picture of the subsurface, with a high-resolution of subsurface features both in horizontal and vertical direction.

Hardware

The MALA MIRA can have up to 31 recording channels with the following features: 

• Ability to transmit pulses from any transmitter to any receiver at any time, a necessary functionality in dense array designs.
• No multiplexing, meaning the system will always run at full speed, regardless if the whole array is active or only a single channel (i.e. traditional single channel GPR). 
 

Array antennas are available as 200MHz, 400MHz and 1.3GHz separate receiver and transmitter elements.  They are designed to allow very dense arrangements and could also be arranged according to your particular needs, to allow for polarimetric studies, etc.  All array antennas are carefully tuned to near identical signatures, a requirement necessary for array operation.  As an option, MALA provides the housing for the antenna arrays with pre-mounted arrangements for a specific vehicle.  The array boxes are equipped with colour marking devices for easier control of area coverage.

Software

Data acquisition is done by means of a ruggedized laptop running Microsoft Windows XP OS.  The acquisition software allows precise quality control as well as automatic tagging of positioning information during acquisition. 

In brief, the processing and interpretation software performs processing, interpolation and 3D migration of the acquired data, followed by interactive interpretation of the features observed.  One important feature, for overall efficiency, is the seamless integration of positioning information, allowing any number of array swaths to be integrated into a seamless dataset.  The results can easily be printed or exported as GIS compatible formats such as, geo-referenced TIFF- of DXT-files.

Clearly the MALA MIRA array is at the cutting edge of GPR investigation.  Due to the investment involved, it is suitable to organisations who undertake a high volume of GPR surveys requiring speed and accuracy.