Implementation of piezoelectric coupled electro-mechanica behavior for damage detection in engineering structures

Assessment of the structural condition plays an important role in determining structural reliability. Development of systems which can monitor structural condition should lead to improved structural safety and reliability. Damage detection is a crucial issue in structural health monitoring and represents therefore an important focus of the research interest over the past years. In this work we present the methodology based on implementation of active piezoelectric materials embedded in or attached to engineering structures, which can successfully be implemented for detection of possible damages owing to their coupled electro-mechanical behavior. Here particularly we are focused on piezoelectrically induced wave propagation through concrete structures, with the aim of damage detection. The method presented here is based on determination of damage indices which reflect the energy variations of the output piezoelectric sensor signals. Due to wave energy change in directions between actuators and sensors in the presence of a damage it is possible to locate the damage by overlaying the images of the damage indices in different directions. Implementation of the method is documented by examples