Health monitoring of reinforced concrete shear walls using smart aggregates

Abstract

In this paper, a smart aggregate-based approach is proposed for the structural healthmonitoring of a concrete shear wall structure. The piezoceramic-based smart aggregateswere distributed in predetermined locations prior to the casting of the concrete structure toform an active-sensing system for the health monitoring purpose. To evaluate the damagein different areas, the concrete shear wall was sectioned into sub-domains and awavelet-packet-based damage index matrix is proposed to evaluate the health status inthese sections. A cyclic loading procedure was applied to gradually fail the concrete shearwall and the proposed structural health monitoring approach was used to performstructural health monitoring during this loading procedure. The experimental results haveshown that the proposed smart aggregate-based approach effectively evaluated thedamage status in different areas and detected the precautionary point to predictthe structural failure. The proposed approach has the potential to be applied tothe structural health monitoring of large-scale concrete shear wall structures.