Health monitoring of concrete structures strengthened with advanced composite materials using piezoelectric transducers

Abstract

An active damage interrogation (ADI) method which uses an array of piezoelectric (PZT) transducers attached to a structure was used to detect and localize disbonds and delaminations of advanced composite reinforcement from concrete structures. The ADI system provides the ability to detect, localize, and estimate the extent of the disbond by actively exciting the structure with PZT transducers and processing the structural response as measured by the PZT transducers. The ADI system makes use of both amplitude and phase information from various actuator/sensor transfer functions, and also provides a unique method for determining when the transducer/structure bond has degraded. This paper investigates the feasibility of using the ADI method for health monitoring of concrete structures repaired with composite materials, and the advantages and limitation of this method are discussed.