Interface monitoring of steel-concrete-steel sandwich structures using piezoelectric transducers

Steel-concrete-steel (SCS) sandwich structures have important advantages over conventional concrete structures, however, bond-slip between the steel plate and concrete may lead to a loss of composite action, resulting in a reduction of stiffness and fatigue life of SCS sandwich structures. Due to the inaccessibility and invisibility of the interface, the interfacial performance monitoring and debonding detection using traditional measurement methods, such as relative displacement between the steel plate and core concrete, have proved challenging. In this work, two methods using piezoelectric transducers are proposed to detect the bond-slip between steel plate and core concrete during the test of the beam. The first one is acoustic emission (AE) method, which can detect the dynamic process of bond-slip. AE signals can be detected when initial micro cracks form and indicate the damage severity, types and locations. The second is electromechanical impedance (EMI) method, which can be used to evaluate the damage due to bond-slip through comparing with the reference data in static state, even if the bond-slip is invisible and suspends. In this work, the experiment is implemented to demonstrate the bond-slip monitoring using above methods. Experimental results and further analysis show the validity and unique advantage of the proposed methods.