ABSTRACT
Civil structures are often exposed to harsh environments and therefore in-service civil structures are under continuous deterioration. Civil structures can also be damaged to varying extents due to man-made and natural hazards such as typhoons, strong earthquakes, floods, fires and collisions. To keep the structures in service, maintenance and repair are inevitable although they are expensive and difficult. A considerable amount of effort has therefore been made to develop innovative smart materials and novel structural systems with a goal that rehabilitation can be effectively accomplished by the structures themselves. Structural self-rehabilitation can be roughly categorised as structural self-centring (SSC), structural self-healing (SSH) and structural self-repairing (SSR). With the onset of structural defects and damages, the SSR system can be activated by the structural health monitoring (SHM) system to prevent further development of structural damage and recover the structural capacity. This chapter first introduces the concept of structural self-rehabilitation and reviews the current research status of structural self-rehabilitation. It then elaborates the SSR systems, in which two studies on self-repairing (SR) concrete (Łukowski and Adamczewski 2013) and SR concrete beams (Kuang and Ou 2008) are concisely introduced. This chapter finally focuses on the synthesis of SSR and SHM systems, in which self-diagnosis and SR steel joints (Kim et al. 2009) and self-diagnosis and SR active tensegrity structures (Adam and Smith 2007) are presented.
