Communicating Materials: Communicating Concrete Development for Construction Industry

This article presents the design of communicating materials and their application to sensing communicating concrete for construction industry. After presenting the concept of communicating materials and its issues in the context of the construction and structure health monitoring, this article depicts the main contributions made so far in the physical development of a communicating concrete expected to be functional more than three decades. To obtain it, a specific cyber-physical architecture is proposed, using a two-level wireless sensor network with sensing and communicating nodes (CN). To maximize the lifetime of the communicating concrete, the energy conservation problem is improved with two proposals: an original energy harvesting system using wireless power transfer for embedded sensing nodes and analytical estimation models for predicting energy consumption of the CN network.