Highly deformable self-sensing cementitious composites enabled by monomer polymerization for full-scale shear wall seismic monitoring

Cementitious composites generally possess high brittleness and low deformability, which greatly limits their engineering applications. Herein, we proposed a method of in-situ polymerization of sodium acrylate (SA) monomers in cement matrix to fabricate highly deformable self-sensing cementitious composites (HD-SSCC) with graphene nanoplatelets (GNP). Engineering performances, sensibility and multi-scale structures of HD-SSCC specimens were tested. Results demonstrate that the HD-SSCC possesses superior water resistivity, strength and deformability. Specifically, the HD-SSCC with 4 % SA showes the increases of flexural strength and compression strength by 139 % and 50 %, and the improvement of fractional change in resistance (FCR) by almost 6 times. The cement hydrates, polyacrylate and GNP jointly build a composite structure that strengthens the material matrix and enhances the sensibility. An HD-SSCC assembly was installed in a full-scale shear wall for seismic monitoring, which shows excellent sensibility at low loads. Our findings provide a simple way towards fabricating low-cost yet high-strength SSCC for structural health monitoring.