Abstract
Due to their multiple advantages, piezoceramic materials have been widely used in structural health monitoring (SHM). Piezoceramic patch-based smart aggregate (SA) and spherical piezoceramic-based smart aggregate (SSA) have been developed for damage detection of concrete structures. However, the stress waves generated by these two types of transducers are limited by their geometry and are unsuitable for use in two-dimensional concrete structures (e.g., shear walls, floors and cement concrete pavements). In this paper, a novel embeddable tubular smart aggregate (TSA) based on a piezoceramic tube was designed, fabricated and tested for use in two-dimensional (2D) structures. Due to its special geometry, radially uniform stress waves can be generated, and thus the TSA is suitable for damage detection in planar structures. The suitability of the transducer for use in structural health monitoring was investigated by characterizing the ability of the transducer to transmit and measure stress waves. Three experiments, including impedance analysis, time of arrival analysis and sweep frequency analysis, were conducted to test the proposed TSA. The experimental results show that the proposed TSA is suitable for monitoring the health condition of two-dimensional concrete structures.
Highlights
Structural health monitoring [1,2,3] and damage detection [4,5,6] techniques have demonstrated their critical roles in detecting potential hazards in civil structures [7,8,9,10], including concrete structures
Yang and Divsholi [30] proposed a damage detection method based on the electromechanical impedance technique
Impedance analysis performed to study the natural frequencies of the tubular smart aggregate (TSA)
Summary
Structural health monitoring [1,2,3] and damage detection [4,5,6] techniques have demonstrated their critical roles in detecting potential hazards in civil structures [7,8,9,10], including concrete structures.Over decades of development, many advanced transducers have been reported in the literature to increase the accuracy of damage detection. Structural health monitoring [1,2,3] and damage detection [4,5,6] techniques have demonstrated their critical roles in detecting potential hazards in civil structures [7,8,9,10], including concrete structures. Piezoelectric-based transducers are commonly used for the structural health monitoring of concrete structures. Due to their rapid response times, low cost and availability in different geometries, piezoelectric transducers are a staple of many practical projects [19,20,21,22,23,24]. The large frequency range (30–400 kHz) examined in their research was divided into sub-frequency intervals. The root mean square deviation of each sub-frequency interval was calculated to estimate the location of the Sensors 2019, 19, 1501; doi:10.3390/s19071501 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors
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