Health monitoring of reinforced concrete shear walls using smart aggregates

In this paper, a smart aggregate-based approach is proposed for the structural health monitoring of a concrete shear wall structure. The piezoceramic-based smart aggregates were distributed in predetermined locations prior to the casting of the concrete structure to form an active-sensing system for the health monitoring purpose. To evaluate the damage in different areas, the concrete shear wall was sectioned into sub-domains and a wavelet-packet-based damage index matrix is proposed to evaluate the health status in these sections. A cyclic loading procedure was applied to gradually fail the concrete shear wall and the proposed structural health monitoring approach was used to perform structural health monitoring during this loading procedure. The experimental results have shown that the proposed smart aggregate-based approach effectively evaluated the damage status in different areas and detected the precautionary point to predict the structural failure. The proposed approach has the potential to be applied to the structural health monitoring of large-scale concrete shear wall structures.