Real-time monitoring to investigate structural performance of hybrid precast concrete educational buildings

The motivation and implementation of a real-time structural health monitoring strategy to determine the structural performance of a number of educational buildings recently constructed in Ireland is discussed in this paper. In recent years, smart materials with embedded instrumentation has been installed in a number of buildings at the National University of Ireland Galway during the construction phase, which allows continuous monitoring of the behaviour of the structure. Instrumentation installed on a number of projects, described in this paper, allow many important aspects of structures to be monitored during construction, as well as in the operational phase of the building such as temperature, concrete and reinforcement strain, deflection, and response to the environment.The authors would also like to thank the National University of Ireland Galway and particularly the Department of Civil Engineering in the College of Engineering and Informatics for the help with the instrumentation in the demonstration buildings. They also wish to thank all the construction personnel and building professionals involved in the demonstrator buildings who facilitated and helped with installing the structural health monitoring systems. The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 project Built2Spec (637221). The second author would like to acknowledge the support of Science Foundation Ireland through the Career Development Award programme (Grant No. 13/CDA/2200).peer-reviewe