PSI - Issue 64

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Antonella D’Alessandro et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 64 (2024) 1160–1167 Author name / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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Fig. 3. Determination of stability in (a) electrical resistance and (b) capacitance without mechanical load for smart mortars at 0 %, 0.025 %, 0.1 %, and 0.25 % CMF content.

Fig. 4. (a) Fractional change in electrical resistance and (b) fractional change in capacitance of smart mortars at 0%, 0.025%, 0.1%, and 0.25% content of CMF.

As shown in Figure 4, the sensitivity of other specimens was significantly lower than that of the samples with 0.25% filler. Samples with filler concentrations of 0.025% and 0.1% exhibited sensitivity values around -0.2, although the 0.025% sample presented a high noise component. The normal sample showed a sensitivity of -0.04, thus demonstrating the beneficial effect of filler on electromechanical performance. 5.3 Application to a small-scale masonry mortar With the aim of exploring the electrical properties of the smart material presented here and its connection to the production of smart self-monitoring masonry for both strain sensing and damage detection, a very simple small wall was constructed. The specimen is simply made of three clay bricks, having 12 cm length, 6 cm width and 10 cm thickness, with two layers of smart mortar, each one having a thickness of 1.25 cm. The layout of the measurement channels is depicted in Figure 5 (a). In this context, capacitance and piezocapacitance were evaluated, leading to stress sensing detection as presented in Figure 5 (b and c).