Damage detection at early cracking stages in shear-critical reinforced concrete beams, before further deterioration and their inevitable brittle shear failure is crucial for structural safety and integrity. The effectiveness of a structural health monitoring technique using the admittance measurements of piezoelectric transducers mounted on a reinforced concrete beam without shear reinforcement is experimentally investigated. Embedded “smart aggregate” transducers and externally bonded piezoelectric patches have been placed in arrays at both shear spans of the beam. Beam were tested till total shear failure and monitored at three different states; healthy, flexural cracking and diagonal cracking. Test results showed that transducers close to the critical diagonal crack provided sound and graduated discrepancies between the admittance responses at the healthy state and thedamage levels.Damage assessment using statistical indices calculated from the measurements of all transducers was also attempted. Rational changes of the index values were obtained with respect to the increase of the damage. Admittance responses and index values of the transducers located on the shear span where the critical diagonal crack formed provided cogent evidence of damage. On the contrary, negligible indication of damage was yielded by the responses of the transducers located on the other shear span, where no diagonal cracking occurred.
The behaviour of reinforced concrete (RC) frames, which have been strengthened by cable elements and are subjected to multi- ple earthquakes, is numerically investigated. The purpose is to estimate damage indices in order to compare the seismic response of the structures before and after the retrofit by cable element strengthening and to select the optimum strengthening version
A numerical approach for estimating the effects of pounding (seismic interaction) on the response of adjacent Civil Engineering structures is presented. Emphasis is given to reinforced concrete (RC) frames of existing buildings which are seismically strengthened by cable-elements. A double discretization, in space by the Finite Element Method and in time by a direct incremental approach is used. The unilateral behaviours of both, the cable-elements and the interfaces contact-constraints, are taken strictly into account and result to inequality constitutive conditions. So, in each time-step, a non-convex linear complementarity problem is solved. It is found that pounding and cable strengthening have significant effects on the earthquake response and, hence, on the seismic upgrading of existing adjacent RC structures.
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