Smart Composites for Durable Infrastructures – Importance of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM)

For existing infrastructures, corrosion and stresscorrosion are detrimental for reinforcing steels. The challenge of how efficiently we can protect steels against corrosion has been for a long time critical. However, knowing how advanced are corrosion protecting techniques used nowadays, is it still relevant to concentrate solely on protecting steel structures or should we focus mostly on structural health monitoring that would enable us identifying the onset of corrosion within steel structures and its rate of extension (which in turn would make us start the premaintenance at the right time) ? In the case of new infrastructures, new materials developed in the last three decades as well as the significant advances recorded in various engineering fields, are currently enabling challenging smart structures to be included as key-parts of bridges. So, how can we proceed to make smart structures increasingly used in bridges ?