Stress Monitoring of Concrete via Uniaxial Piezoelectric Sensor

Abstract

The uniaxial piezoelectric sensor was developed to overcome the problem of reflecting the output charge of the piezoelectric element as a combination of vectors in the three stress directions. The work performance of the uniaxial piezoelectric sensor under varying load patterns and load rates was investigated. The sensor was embedded in concrete to monitor stress, and its elastic modulus was used as the intermediate bridge to establish the correlation between the embedded sensor and the external sensor. Furthermore, a correction factor for the charge transformation strain was suggested to overcome the mismatching of the sensor’s medium and the concrete. Considering related circumstances, a new stress monitoring method based on a uniaxial piezoelectric sensor was proposed, which can achieve stress whole-process monitoring in concrete and confining stress monitoring in the reinforced concrete column. The results reveal that through the proposed method, the output charge curve of the sensor has a substantial overlap with the stress waveform and high fitting linearity. The work performance of the sensor was stable, and its sensitivity was not affected by loading rate and load pattern. The sensor was embedded in concrete and can coordinate with the concrete deformation. The correction factor of strain obtained by the sensor embedded in concrete was 1.07. The relationship between the charge produced by the embedded sensor and its external calibration sensitivity may be used to implement the whole process of stress monitoring in concrete.