ABSTRACT
Materials are the elements, constituents or substances of which something is composed or made. In civil structures, commonly used materials include wood, stone, bronze, steel, aluminium, concrete, composites and plastics. The material itself is not smart, but the materials with unusual, interesting, amazing and useful properties that can be used to design and develop smart structures may be called smart materials. Modern materials science is facilitating the creation of diverse smart materials. There are many text books that give detailed summaries of various smart materials (Gandhi and Thompson 1992; Srinivasan and McFarland 2001; Chopra and Sirohi 2014). Nevertheless, only some materials of interest in developing smart civil structures and their basic characteristics are discussed in this chapter. These smart materials include shape memory alloys (SMAs), piezoelectric materials, magnetostrictive materials, electrorheological (ER) and magnetorheological (MR) fluids, optical fibre, bio-inspired materials and nanomaterials.
