Real-time monitoring to investigate structural performance of hybrid precast concrete educational buildings

The motivation and implementation of a real-time structural health monitoring strategy to determine the structural performance of a number of educational buildings recently constructed in Ireland is discussed in this paper. In recent years, smart materials with embedded instrumentation has been installed in a number of buildings at the National University of Ireland Galway during the construction phase, which allows continuous monitoring of the behaviour of the structure. Instrumentation installed on a number of projects, described in this paper, allow many important aspects of structures to be monitored during construction, as well as in the operational phase of the building such as temperature, concrete and reinforcement strain, deflection, and response to the environment.