Civil structures must meet the highest safety standards. The new sensory-based technologies allow structural deficiencies to be detected and risk conditions to be identified, allowing measures to be adopted.
There is also a need to reduce infrastructure maintenance costs throughout its useful life and to extend it if possible. This requires laborious studies that are based on establishing, at each moment, what state the structure is in.
3S'TECH, after 5 years of development and field tests, has developed a sensor that allows you to see the evolution of the tensioning process of a structure.
Both at the initial moment (tension phase) and in the primary phase (instantaneous tension losses), as well as throughout the useful life of the structure (deferred tension losses).
In the case of the post-thesis, the methodology carried out is as follows:
Field tests:
It is applied to a certain number of tendons during the construction process, which makes it possible to read the exact tension applied during tensioning as well as its losses. In this way, the results can be applied statistically to the rest of the tendons in the structure, which offers the possibility to optimize the batch of tendons to be installed and the appropriate tensioning level to be applied.
Final installation:
Some sensors are installed that will continue to measure throughout the duration of the work or beyond. This makes it possible to determine deferred losses and to have data in case the structure needs to be re-tested.
