Abstract
Cracks in concrete structures can be indicators of important damage and may significantly affect durability. Their timely identification can be used to ensure structural safety and guide on-time maintenance operations. Structural health monitoring solutions, such as strain gauges and fiber optics systems, have been proposed for the automatic monitoring of such cracks. However, these solutions become economically difficult to deploy when the surface under investigation is very large. This paper proposes to leverage a novel sensing skin for monitoring cracks in concrete structures. This sensing skin is constituted of a flexible electronic termed soft elastomeric capacitor, which detects a change in strain through changes in measured capacitance. The SEC is a low-cost, durable, and robust sensing technology that has previously been studied for the monitoring of fatigue cracks in steel components. In this study, the sensing skin is introduced and preliminary validation results on a small-scale reinforced concrete beam are presented. The technology is verified on a full-scale post-tensioned concrete beam. Results show that the sensing skin is capable of detecting, localizing, and quantifying cracks that formed in both the reinforced and post-tensioned concrete specimens.
Highlights
Cracks that manifest in concrete structures can be caused by a combination of poor construction practices, deleterious chemical reactions such as corrosion and alkali-aggregate reactions, construction overloads, cyclic freezing and thawing damage [1]
This study aims at extending previous research efforts on the soft elastomeric capacitors (SECs) to the monitoring of cracks in concrete
This paper presented the study of a novel sensing skin for the detection, localization, and quantification of cracks in concrete
Summary
Cracks that manifest in concrete structures can be caused by a combination of poor construction practices, deleterious chemical reactions such as corrosion and alkali-aggregate reactions, construction overloads, cyclic freezing and thawing damage [1]. Cracks may represent the full extent of the damage or may point to problems of a larger scale. Their gravity depends on the type of structural system and the nature of cracking. Various evaluation techniques can be leveraged during an inspection to determine the location and extent of cracking, and to evaluate the general condition of the concrete. These methods include visual inspections and nondestructive evaluation techniques such as impact-echo [2], ultrasonic [3], acoustic
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