Novel Sensors Design for SHM of RC Using the Opto-Mechatronics Technologies

recently, health monitoring of structures possesses great attention for various purposes. One of them follows the status of the existing structure, especially if it is an infrastructure that handles traffic load and mainstream of any country. Secondly, it lowers the cost of maintenance and rehabilitation as no human skills are required for testing existing structures and evaluating manuals. In addition, it lowers the budget cost for any existing structures and specifies exactly the required budget for repairing the defective parts in these structures. In this paper, two novel new techniques are suggested over monitoring the structures: external and internal. The techniques are mainly based on reading the deformation optically on the first technique, while the second technique exploits the measurement of the back electromotive force (back EMF voltages). The output voltages and deformation readings are reported for supported beams. From the analytical results, the resolution for the first technique is reported up to 0.2N, around 20 gm On the other hand, the second technique implied 31.25N, rendering around 3186.6gm The results show two orders of magnitudes enhancement when using the first technique, depending on the optical sensing element over the other one.