Multidirectional Crack Monitoring of Concrete Structures Using 3D Piezoceramic Sensing Array

Since concrete structures are usually accompanied with cracks during service life, it is of great significance to conduct health monitoring for damage assessment and warning. In recent years, piezoceramic transducers have shown their unique advantages in structural damage monitoring. However, multidirectional crack monitoring of concrete structures with complex geometries based on piezoceramic transducers is still a research gap. In addition, there is a lack of strategies for sensor placement of a given concrete structure. This paper presents the authors' recent work to perform multidirectional crack monitoring of concrete structures using embedded 3D piezoceramic sensing array, which is composed of spherical smart aggregate (SSA) and smart aggregate (SA). A case study was investigated on a full‐scaled Skew Inverted‐T Bent Cap (60‐ITBC) specimen. Concrete damaged plasticity (CDP) analysis based on finite element model was first carried out to provide guidance for sensor placement strategy. The 60‐ITBC specimen with pre‐embedded SSA‐SA sensing array was then tested under static load. Meanwhile, SSA‐SA sensing array was controlled by active sensing approach to monitor crack development during loading process. In order to characterize damage development, two damage quantitative indexes DI and DT were presented based on received piezoelectric signals from experiment and tensile damage evolution parameter from simulation, respectively. The comparison analysis showed that experiment result DI shows good agreement with simulation result DT and real crack development of specimen. The proposed 3D piezoceramic sensing array can be applied on multidirectional crack monitoring in concrete structure and the numerical‐guided sensor placement strategy is reliable.