Follow-up methods for autonomic repairing process

The technical maintenance of civil concrete structures is not really cheap. A way to reduce maintenance-related costs is to have a concrete capable of repairing itself when damaged. This paper presents a cybernetic engineering approach for self-healing in concrete. The approach is inspired by the biological self-healing principle to make self-repairing possible in concrete. It consists of adding biological and chemical agents (bacteria) to concrete mix along with Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) to get an improved self-healing effect. A challenging issues related to this approach is that effective monitoring of the progress of the self-healing process. The main challenge is the diagnosis and even prognosis of the cybernetic concrete health. This paper proposes different testing methods to monitor the self-healing in cybernetic concrete. These methods allow for diagnosis and prognosis of the self-healing process in the above concrete. Experimental results from the above tests carried out in conventional and cybernetic concrete samples are shown. Conclusions and future work are also presented.