Structural Integrity

This PhD project is aimed at the development of advanced sensor technologies to monitor/measure moisture and chloride in built structures (mainly concrete). The application of this work is relevant to remediation of structures used to house contaminated waste, sustainable development of civil infrastructure and possibly monitoring cement used to encapsulate intermediate level radioactive waste.  The project particularly focuses on the design, fabrication and evaluation of embeddable moisture/chloride sensors for applications in concrete.  The embeddable sensors will be developed using various systems such as graphene, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and MicroElectroMechnical Systems (MEMS). Small scale samples and field trials will be used to evaluate the performance of the sensors in terms of durability, sensitivity and resolution.