Advanced Sensing Techniques for Damage Detection in Reinforced Concrete Structures

This paper primarily presents a comparison of traditional and advanced sensing techniques in the field of structural health monitoring for use in damage detection in reinforced concrete (RC) structures. The accuracy of these methods is evaluated through standard laboratory tests on concrete cylinders. Furthermore, a damage detection method for RC structures is introduced where strains measured from densely clustered sensors are used to develop damage sensitive features. This method is verified through simulation data from a fiber element model of a new earthquake resistant RC coupled shear wall system. A large scale specimen of this system with a dense network of embedded strain gauges, displacement and rotation transducers, as well as digital image correlation systems was recently tested. The data collected through this experiment will be used to experimentally validate the proposed damage detection method.