Fatigue Damage Assessment of RC Column using PZT Sensors

Due to ruggedness, cost-effectiveness and high damage sensitivity, PZT sensors have been effectively used for structural health monitoring. Health monitoring is the continuous measurement of the loading environment and the critical responses of systems or its components. The present work deals with mainly the application of EMI technique to assess damage in RC Column using concrete embedded PZT sensors. Two vertical RC Columns of different characteristics with embedded CVS are tested under fatigue loading conditions through shake table and their peak voltages were observed with time history till failure. The scope of the project is to full fledge damage prognosis of RC Column under fatigue load with an attempt to forecast system performance assessing the current damage state of the system (i.e. Structural Health Monitoring) and ultimately predict through simulation and past experience the remaining useful life of the system. Through this experiment it is concluded that in SHM, the CVS are effective to quantify local damage in RC structure. Natural frequency of column is a direct measure for stiffness and is observed decreasing with increasing damage & remaining life of RC Column specimen under fatigue loads is estimated. A formula has been devised for this purpose. The future objective of this project includes quantification of damage by modelling the structure as a combination of mass, spring and damper components and comparing both the experimental and analytical values to derive empirical relation to estimate remaining life of structure under fatigue.