Curing Strength Monitoring of Early-Age Concrete Using Embedded Piezoelectric Sensors for Ubiquitous Construction Process Management

Abstract

In the construction using the concrete, it’s strongly required to evaluate the strength development during the curing process to ensure the good quality of concrete. Especially, monitoring the curing strength at early-age is very important to reduce the construction cost and time because it can provide the accurate information for the decision to progress to the next process safely. In this context, a high frequency dynamic response based nondestructive curing strength gain monitoring method that can be utilized even for the early-age concrete structures was proposed. This approach used embedded piezo-electric sensors which were inserted at the same time with concrete placement to measure the high frequency dynamic response signal from the early-age concrete. While the concrete is cured, the guided wave signals from the embedded sensors were measured continuously at a regular interval, and it was observed that the velocity of guided wave is varied according to the concrete curing process. The changing pattern of the wave velocity was compared with the development of the compressive strength from compression test, their hysteresis curves were changed in a similar manner.