2026/07/01 by Yufan Wang, Guodong Su, Chengming Lan +4
paper · doi:10.1088/1361-665x/ae8a24
Abstract With the continuous development of modern civil engineering, piezoelectric cement-based transducers based on electromechanical impedance technique have demonstrated significant potential in structural health monitoring. However, traditional single-element piezoelectric devices suffer from limitations in output power and sensing range. To overcome this limitation, this paper innovatively proposes a novel piezoelectric stacked array cement-based transducer (PSACT). Three identical piezoelectric stacks were arranged in an array and encapsulated within a cement matrix. Two groups of the PSACTs with different piezoelectric stacked layers were fabricated and subjected to systematic testing, including temperature and humidity sensitivity tests, soil moisture content tests, sulfate attack tests, and bearing capacity tests after sulfate attack. The test results indicate that the PSACTs exhibit exceptional robustness to environmental humidity but are highly sensitive to temperature. In large-volume soil moisture content tests, as moisture content increased, the statistical indicators of the conductance signals all exhibited the step-like increase. Finally, the results of the sulfate attack tests and bearing capacity tests indicate that the frequency shift of the PSACTs’ maximum conductance peak did not exceed 3%, and the rate of mass change did not exceed 5%. The research findings prove that the proposed PSACTs exhibit good frequency stability and durability in a laboratory-simulated erosive environment.