PSI - Issue 78

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

Procedia Structural Integrity 78 (2026) 2102–2109

© 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of XX ANIDIS Conference organizers Keywords: cementitious materials; self-sensing; piezoresistive e ff ect; micromechanics; structural health monitoring; multiphysics The proposed model is used to evaluate the influence of various mechanical, electrical and loading parameters on the piezoresis tive behaviour of cementitious materials, indicating potential future areas of focus for further experimental and numerical simula tionwork. XX ANIDIS Conference Interpreting and modelling the high piezoresistive sensing performance of cementitious materials Anastasios Drougkas a, ∗ , Virginia Mendiza´bal b , Borja Mart´ınez b , Ernest Bernat-Maso b , Llu´ısGil b a Department of Civil Engineering Educators, School of Pedagogical and Technological Education, Athens, Greece b Department of Strength of Materials and Structural Engineering, Universitat Polite`cnica de Catalunya, Terrassa, Spain Abstract Self-sensing cementitious materials are set to play a crucial part in structural health monitoring operations on buildings and infras tructure due to the ubiquitous presence of cement-based materials in the built environment, their ease of modification for enhanced sensing capabilities and the low cost of application. It is therefore of prime importance to fundamentally understand the physical mechanisms behind their self-sensing performance. One of the salient characteristics of cementitious materials is their notably high piezoresistive sensitivity under compression, reaching an order of magnitude above what would be expected from simple coupled electrical-mechanical analysis, even before modification with electrically conductive inclusions. While widely observed in the lab and tentatively attributed to various micro or nano-scale material features and phenomena, this remarkable characteristic has not been su ffi ciently modelled and explained. This paper o ff ers a micro-mechanical interpretation of the physical mechanisms behind the high piezoresistive gauge factor of cementitious materials. By accounting for the distortion of the shape of the di ff erent phases of the material, such as the paste, pores and aggregates, the resulting shifts in e ff ective volume fractions as well as the closure of cracks perpendicularly oriented with respect to the load direction, the gauge factor of the material is able to reach the experimentally-derived values.

1. Introduction

The piezoresistive self-sensing capabilities of building materials used in load-bearing structures, pavements and coatings are a remarkable feature that can be leveraged for e ffi cient and distributed monitoring of structural and

∗ Anastasios Drougkas E-mail address: adrougkas@civil.aspete.gr

2452-3216 © 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of XX ANIDIS Conference organizers 10.1016/j.prostr.2025.12.267