ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL CONCRETE ABSTRACTS PORTAL

  • The International Concrete Abstracts Portal is an ACI led collaboration with leading technical organizations from within the international concrete industry and offers the most comprehensive collection of published concrete abstracts.

International Concrete Abstracts Portal

  


Title: Carbon Black Engineered Cementitious Composites - Mechanical and Electrical Characterization

Author(s): Mo Li, Vincent W. J. Lin, Jerome P. Lynch and Victor C. Li

Publication: Symposium Paper

Volume: 292

Issue:

Appears on pages(s): 1-16

Keywords: damage detection, electrical impedance, engineered cementitious composite, structural health monitoring.

DOI: 10.14359/51686287

Date: 10/2/2013

Abstract:
The protection and health monitoring of deteriorating concrete infrastructure requires a new generation of self-sensing structural materials that possess intrinsic damage tolerance but offer self-sensing capabilities that are tailored to diagnose states of cracking. Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) doped with carbon black (CB) nano-particles are proposed as highly damage-tolerant materials whose electrical properties can be correlated to strain and cracking. This study investigated the effect of CB dosage on the CB-ECC rheological, mechanical and electrical properties. By incorporating CB nano-particles into the ECC system while simultaneously controlling the rheological properties of the fresh mix, the fully cured CB-ECC elements achieved close-to-uniform PVA fiber and carbon black dispersion, reduced bulk resistivity by an order of magnitude, strain hardening behavior with tensile strain capacity of 0.26 to 1.38%, and reduced crack widths of 30 to 40 m during tensile loading. Furthermore, all of the CB-ECC specimens exhibited prominent piezoresistive behavior with resistivity increasing in tandem with applied tensile strain, thereby indicating the potential of CB-ECC for strain and damage sensing.