A Feasibility Study on Monitoring Pile-Soil Bonding Condition Using Piezoceramic Transducer and Horizontal Impact

• Main Authors: Daopei Zhu, Siyuan Tian, Haocheng Yan, Zhangli Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2021-01-01
• Series: Journal of Sensors
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2021/5575854

The in situ evaluation of pile-soil bonding condition plays an important role for pile safety assessment in its life cycle. However, so far, there is still no fully mature tool to analyze such couplings, since the pile-soil coupling exhibits complex and time-varying relationships. This paper innovatively proposes a health monitoring approach to evaluate the bonding status of the soil and pile contact area. An impact method based on a piezoelectric ceramic sensor is proposed to monitor the bond of pile and soil. A horizontal impact was introduced near the top of the pile, and the induced stress waves were detected by the piezoceramic smart aggregate (SA) sensor embedded in the pile. Different crack damage sizes were made between the soil and the pile to investigate the change of the bonding. An energy index was developed to quantitatively evaluate the quality of the bonding as a pile-soil bonding index. The proposed approach inspired a potential way to directly judge if there is crack damage between the pile and soil and to evaluate pile safety.