Advanced Monitoring of Structures and Infrastructures Through Smart Composite Sensors and Systems

The monitoring of the performance conditions of structures and infrastructures during their service life and after critical events is an extremely timely topic. The potentialities of novel sensors and systems stay in their reliability and flexibility. Indeed, due to their peculiar characteristics which could possess localized features, structures should be instrumented by diffused sensing systems. Traditional sensors could generally be placed only in a limited number of locations by external applications: these occurrences weaken their durability and reliability. Boosted performance are coming from novel smart materials which can combine structural performance with enhanced properties, as sensing ones. In particular, the authors have made several research efforts on the preparation and the application of self-sensing structural materials, cement- and clay-based, doped with conductive fillers. This paper presents the investigation of sensing capabilities and the possible applications of cementitious materials with different carbon-based fillers. Such composites could be embedded or can constitute structural elements, thus generating a diffused smart monitoring system. Possible applications stay in the monitoring of all kinds of concrete structures and infrastructures, including dynamic monitoring, traffic monitoring, damage detection, analysis of the strain/stress field variations.