Engineering Commons^™

A Novel Tdr-Based Coaxial Cable Sensor For Crack/Strain Sensing In Reinforced Concrete Structures, Shishuang Sun, David Pommerenke, James L. Drewniak, Genda Chen, Liang Xue, Michael A. Brower, Marina Koledintseva

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Novel coaxial cable sensors that feature high sensitivity and high spatial resolution are developed for health monitoring of concrete structures using a time-domain reflectometry (TDR). The new sensor was designed based on the topology change of its outer conductor, which was fabricated with tightly wrapped commercial tin-plated steel spiral covered with solder. The cracks that developed within concrete structures will lead to out-of-contact of local steel spirals. This topology change results in a large impedance discontinuity that can be measured with a TDR. A simplified equivalent transmission line model and numerical full-wave simulations using finite-difference time-domain techniques were used to …