Abstract
Concrete failure will lead to serious safety concerns in the performance of a building structure. It is one of the biggest challenges for engineers to inspect and maintain the quality of concrete throughout the service years in order to prevent structural deterioration. To date, a lot of research is ongoing to develop different instruments to inspect concrete quality. Detection of moisture ingress is important in the structural monitoring of concrete. This paper presents a novel sensing technique using a smart antenna for the non-destructive evaluation of moisture content and deterioration inspection in concrete blocks. Two different standard concrete samples (United Kingdom and Malaysia) were investigated in this research. An electromagnetic (EM) sensor was designed and embedded inside the concrete to detect the moisture content within the structure. In addition, CST microwave studio was used to validate the theoretical model of the EM sensor against the test data. The results demonstrated that the EM sensor at 2.45 GHz is capable of detecting the moisture content in the concrete with linear regression of R2 = 0.9752. Furthermore, identification of different mix ratios of concrete were successfully demonstrated in this paper. In conclusion, the EM sensor is capable of detecting moisture content non-destructively and could be a potential technique for maintenance and quality control of the building performance.
Highlights
Concrete structures play an important role in structural health of buildings, bridges, and so forth. [1]
It undergoes rapid deterioration when exposed to aggressive environments and unpredictable weather changes, which leads to a reduction in service life
A linear regression of 0.9228 which suggesting that this signal region could be potential for moisture content measurements
Summary
Concrete structures play an important role in structural health of buildings, bridges, and so forth. [1]. Concrete structures play an important role in structural health of buildings, bridges, and so forth. It is important to ensure the service life of concrete structures are monitored [3]. About 3% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) that is, US$ 2.2 trillion lost has been reported from world statistics owing to a premature deterioration of concrete structures [4]. Structural health plays a significant role for the risk of building collapse, which may cause injuries or even death to occupants [5]. Reliability of concrete and reinforced concrete (RC) structures can be ensured through accurate prediction of service life, which is influenced by several deteriorating factors such as corrosion of embedded metals, chemical attack, erosion, surface defect and so forth [6]
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