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Design and Validation of Embedded Piezoelectric Transducers for Damage Detection Applications in Concrete Structures

Current maintenance of concrete civil infrastructure such as buildings, bridges, dams and highways, is based on scheduled inspection consisting in visual and/or local inspection techniques (i.e. acoustic/ultrasonic methods, radiography, eddy-current methods). A major trend in the field is the development of automated on-line monitoring systems. The current study is focused on the use of ultrasonic wave propagation techniques based on embedded piezoelectric transducers for the on-line monitoring of the damage state in concrete. The technique is based on the use of an ultrasonic emitter-receiver pair and the construction of a damage indicator focused on the early wave arrival. The proposed simple monitoring system is implemented during several pull-out tests on concrete blocks. The results demonstrate the excellent performance of the system which is able to detect the initiation and follow the evolution of the cracking until complete failure.