Self-sensing carbon nanotube reinforced composites for smart cities

Abstract

Self-sensing composite materials are becoming attractive for civil engineering application to improve the safety and performance of structures. Current structural health monitoring still requires many sensing devices and technicians for their visual inspection, which are expensive and time consuming. Proposed self-sensing composite materials consisting of carbon nanotubes and polymer provide innovative way for structural health monitoring. The smart composites show significant change in their electrical resistance with applied loadings such as static and impact loadings. In this study, we will fabricate highly conductive carbon nanotube reinforced composite materials for sensor integrated construction materials. The author reports materials design and optimisation of carbon nanotube reinforced composite materials in terms of electrical conductivity and mechanical property. Moreover, we investigate the electro-mechanical response of carbon nanotube reinforced composite materials under static and impact loadings. Finally, we will present new Internet of Things (IoT)-based sensing system that capture various data from smart composite material itself without any additional sensing elements.