Study on Utilizing Carbon Fiber Mortar as Sensor to Investigate the Fatigue Damage of Concrete Deck Slab

This paper shows a fundamental study on using Carbon Fiber Mortar(CFM) asa sort of sensor to investigate the fatigue damage of concrete deck slabbased on its electrical sensitivity to the material mechanical performance. In this study, two volume percentages of the short carbon fibers mixed into the mortar were considered, which were around 0.2% and 0.4%. The influences of the atmosphere temperature, the embedded rebar and the electrical measuring time on the material electrical conductivity were tested at first. And then the CFM were mounted into the concrete deck slab specimens. These slab specimens were designed for the wheel loading fatigue tests. The observations indicated that the electrical conductivity of the mounted CFM varied with the fatigue damage development generally. It confirmed the feasibility of using CFM as a sensor to reflect the slab mechanical status.