Electro-mechanical impedance technique for concrete strength monitoring: Three-dimensional model development and experimental verification

During the application of the electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) technique for detecting the strength devel-opment of concrete, in some cases, the piezoelectric sensor is embedded in the concrete. Normally, there are two methods to embed the piezoelectric sensor: PS-EMI and CPS-EMI. For both methods, the observed resonance frequency of the piezoelectric sensor increases with the increase of the concrete strength. However, there is a contradiction in the trend of conductance amplitude at the resonance frequency, which has to an extent puzzled the researchers in this area. In this paper, we developed a three-dimensional EMI model for the embedded piezoelectric sensor. We discussed the underlying mechanism, which induces the conductance spectrum differ-ence for the PS-EMI and CPS-EMI, and experimental verification was carried out. By plotting the evolution of the concrete strength as a function of the resonance frequency shift, it was found that both embedding methods can be used in practical applications.