Applications of Cement-Based Smart Composites to Civil Structural Health Monitoring: A Review

In recent years, cement-based smart composites (CSCs) doped with conductive filler have attracted increasing research interest because of their high potentiality as self-sensing materials for civil Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications. Nevertheless, several issues are still open and need further studies. This paper presents an extensive state-of-the-art in which investigations on CSCs are summarized and critically revised, with the primary aim of outlining the main limits and development points. The literature review first addresses in detail several specific issues related to fabrication and operation as sensing elements of CSC samples. State-of-the-art applications of CSCs to SHM of reduced-, medium- and full-scale structural prototypes are extensively reviewed afterwards, resulting in a database useful to critically revise the main trends and open issues of the research in this field.