Experimental Study on Polymer Nanocomposites Based Strain Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract

The aim is to develop a mechanically flexible polymer nanocomposite film-based strain sensors that could act towards sustainable structural health monitoring for civil structures. The developed polymer nanocomposite film combinations will be monitored for their structural, electrical and mechanical behaviors and the optimized formulations will be tried for strain sensing applications. The films were cast by using PVA as the base polymer and copper doped silver nitrate as the nanofiller along with the use of glycine as fuel which is a combination of silver and copper nitrate. After preparing the films, they were tested for conductivity under tensile loading using a digital multi meter connected to a UTM. The samples were subjected to XRD, FTIR and SEM for further analysis. The results of the experiments shown I-V characteristics of PVA-CuAgO composites from 5% to 25% CuAgO have been increased tremendously with the incorporation of filler material. For 100 V, the maximum current value obtained for plain PVA is only 7.7E-8 A, whereas CuAgO particles shown 0.0025 A at 5% reinforcements and further increased nearly to 0.025 A for 25% of CuAgO particles into the PVA matrix.