Health Monitoring of RC Frame Structure to Shake Table Excitations

Structural health monitoring of RC structures under seismic loads has recently attracted attention in the earthquake engineering research. In this paper, a piezoceramic-based device called “smart aggregate” was used for the health monitoring of RC frame structures under earthquake excitations. A two-story one-bay RC moment frame instrumented with smart aggregates was tested using a shake table. The distributed piezoceramic-based smart aggregates embedded in the RC structures were used to monitor the health condition of the structures during the tests. The sensitiveness and effectiveness of the proposed piezoceramic-based approach were investigated and evaluated by analyzing the measured responses.