English
Ελληνικά
Most civil infrastructure construction is made of concrete and steel-reinforced concrete, and it is generally a very expensive national investment. Concrete and steel-reinforced structures have a long service life compared to other products but also age and deteriorate with time. In addition, retrofitting and/or strengthening facilities of concrete structures with fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP) have been proven to be an economical and feasible solution to existing deteriorated concrete structures nationwide. Recently, structural health monitoring has been increasingly recognized as a viable tool for improving the safety and reliability of concrete and retrofitted concrete structures.
The present research is aimed at developing a novel active structural health monitoring system with built-in diagnostics to detect anomaly in structural integrity condition of concrete and reinforced concrete structures. Basically, it will apply the authors' recent pioneering research work in piezoceramic-based "smart aggregates" and their innovative applications in concrete structures.
The proposed smart aggregates are multi-functional performing different tasks including early-age concrete strength monitoring and structural health monitoring. To demonstrate the multi-functionality of the proposed smart aggregates from their earliest stages and throughout their lifetime, different types of concrete structures have been used as test objects, including conventional steel-reinforced and FRP-strengthened concrete beams and frames constructed in both lab and full scale.
A further important and pioneering result of the present work will be the miniaturization of the hardware of the proposed prototype sensing system integrating very small sized sensing nodes functioning as a network and incorporating web-based measurements and damage identification algorithms with data transmitted to remote base stations using wireless interface.
