Follow up methods for autonomic repairing process
The technical maintenance of civil concrete structures is not really cheap. A way to reduce maintenance related costs is to have a concrete capable of repairing itself when damaged. This paper presents a cybernetic engineering approach for self healing in concrete. The approach is inspired by the biological self healing principle to make self repairing possible in concrete. It consists of adding biological and chemical agents (bacteria) to concrete mix along with Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) to get an improved self healing effect. A challenging issues related to this approach is that effective monitoring of the progress of the self healing process. The main challenge is the diagnosis and even prognosis of the cybernetic concrete health. This paper proposes different testing methods to monitor the self healing in cybernetic concrete. These methods allow for diagnosis and prognosis of the self healing process in the above concrete. Experimental results from the above tests carried out in conventional and cybernetic concrete samples are shown. Conclusions and future work are also presented.
2016 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)