Experimental Study on Detection of Local Damage of Concrete Beam End Based on EMI Technique

Abstract

Nondestructive detection evaluation technique which based on the electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) method is widely used for structure health monitoring (SHM). The arrangement of piezoelectric transducer (PZT) includes two types, surface-mounted and embedded. A lot of researches have been done about two kind of transducer based on EMI method, however the effect of two types on the same damage condition requires to be researched deeply. Therefore, the objective of this investigation is comparing the effect of two kind types of PZT in detecting local damage of concrete beam end. An experiment was set up to detect local damage of the beam by EMI method with both embedded and surface-mounted PZT. The experiment result shows that EMI method is available to detect local damage of concrete beam end. The surface-mounted PZT is more sensitive to local damage of concrete beam end, meanwhile surface-mounted PZT is more vulnerable to the environment and other factors.