A review on health monitoring of concrete structures using embedded piezoelectric sensor

Concrete commonly constitutes approximately fifty percent in building constructions and its significance extends even further, often exceeding fifty percent in infrastructure projects such as dams and marine structures. Consequently, ensuring the integrity of concrete structures is crucial both during their construction phase and under service loads. Therefore, it becomes imperative to monitor various phases of the concrete life cycle encompassing construction (strength monitoring), service life (damage monitoring under different loading conditions and durability monitoring when exposed to different environmental exposures) to avoid potential catastrophic failures. Over the last two decades, structural health monitoring (SHM) using different piezo sensor configurations have gained a lot of interest among researchers for monitoring concrete structures due to their non-destructive nature, real-time monitoring capabilities, early damage detection and potential for reducing downtime and costs. Among the different piezo configurations, embedded piezo sensor has gained significant attentions as it allows monitoring from the time concrete is poured. This paper provides a comprehensive review of embedded piezo sensor configuration for monitoring the different life stages of concrete structures. Based on their manufacturing, these sensors are initially classified into different clusters and their performance is evaluated for each SHM application covering various phases of concrete life cycle. The present review summarizes the existing knowledge of using embedded piezo sensors for SHM, making it easier for researchers to get up to speed on the state of the art and identify unexplored areas, and start a further investigation.