Sensitive Skin and the Relative Sensing System for Real-time Surface Monitoring of Crack in Civil Infrastructure

It is difficult for the existing point monitoring methods to find the initial crack on the civil infrastructure. In this article, by adopting the area monitoring method, the sensitive skin and the relative sensing system is proposed, which has the ability to real-time monitor the initial crack on the surface of civil infrastructure. The system is composed of three main parts: sensitive skin, secondary processor, and terminal processor. The concrete specimen experiments show that the system can monitor the structural surface crack with the width down to 0.02 mm and reflect the shape and length of the crack effectively. Because the whole circuit is digital and the most consumed sensitive skin is inexpensive, the system may have excellent performance in cost, accuracy, and sensitivity.