Health monitoring of reinforced concrete structures based on PZT admittance signal

Reinforced concrete (RC) structure is one of most familiar engineering structure styles in the civil engineering community, which often suffer crack damage during their service life because of some factors such as overloading, excessive use, and bad environmental conditions. Thus early detection of crack damage is of special concern for RC structures. Piezoelectric materials have direct and converse piezoelectric effects and can serve as actuators or sensors. A health monitoring method based on PZT admittance signals is addressed in this paper, which use the electromechanical coupling property of piezoelectric materials. An experimental study on health monitoring of a RC beam is implemented based on the PZT admittance signals. In this experiment, the electrical admittances of distributed PZT sheets are measured when the host beams are suffering from variable loads. From the obtained PZT admittance curves one can find that the presence of incipient crack can be captured and the cracking load of the RC beam can also generally determined. By the experimental study it is concluded that the health monitoring technique is quite effective and sensitive for RC structures, which indicates its favorable application foreground in civil engineering field.