Structural Health Monitoring of a Concrete Frame Subjected to Shake Table Excitations Using Smart Aggregates

Structural health monitoring of RC structures under seismic loads has recently attracted dramatic attention in the earthquake engineering research community. In this paper, a piezoceramic-based device called “smart aggregate” was used for the health monitoring of a two stories one bay RC frame structure under earthquake excitations. The RC moment frame instrumented with smart aggregates was tested using a shake table with different ground excitation intensities. The distributed piezoceramic-based smart aggregates embedded in the RC structure were used to monitor the health condition of the structure during the tests. The sensitiveness and effectiveness of the proposed piezoceramic-based approach were investigated and evaluated by analyzing the measured responses.