Structural Engineering Commons^™

Soft Capacitive Sensor For Structural Health Monitoring Of Large-Scale Systems, Simon Laflamme, M. Kollosche, J. J. Connor, G. Kofod

Simon Laflamme

Structural integrity of infrastructures can be preserved if damage is diagnosed, localized, and repaired in time. During the past decade, there has been a considerable effort to automate the process of structural health monitoring, which is complicated by the inherent large size of civil structures. Hence, a need has arisen to develop new approaches that enable more effective health monitoring.In this paper, a new sensing technique for damage localization on large civil structures is proposed. Specifically, changes in strain are detected using a capacitance sensor built with a soft, stretchable dielectric polymer with attached stretchable metal film electrodes. A change …