Use of drones as complement to safety tests on the structures. Study on the chimney stacks of the brownfields

Our cities are rich in historical testimonies of a productive past, many industrial areas that years ago have been a source of income and work are now totally abandoned. Chimneys stacks are an interesting constructive historical episode, because of their representativeness and their materic characteristics. Their size and location, often inside the city centers, sometimes makes them potentially dangerous to safety, so it is necessary to study their conservation status and their resistance to time and stress. The difficulty of finding designs and reliefs and their height and position often make the approach to knowledge difficult, so putting together traditional methods of study with tools used for other disciplines, such as drones, could be useful and simplifyed. The paper aims to address the issue of brownfields and their knowledge, with a multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach, where the traditional tools and surveys are supported methods that are still little used in these disciplines. It will bring to light the limitations and potentiality of future developments, into the perspective of an improve of the application of a BIM system to the conservation of the architectonic heritage.