Experimental Research on Shear Failure Monitoring of Composite Rocks Using Piezoelectric Active Sensing Approach

Underground space engineering structures are generally subject to extensive damages and significant deformation. Given that composite rocks are prone to shear failure, which cannot be accurately monitored, the piezoelectric active sensing method and wavelet packet analysis method were employed to conduct a shear failure monitoring test on composite rocks in this study. For the experiment, specimens were prepared for the simulation of the composite rocks using cement. Two pairs of piezoelectric smart aggregates (SAs) were embedded in the composite specimens. When the specimens were tested using the direct shear apparatus, an active sensing-based monitoring test was conducted using the embedded SAs. Moreover, a wavelet packet analysis was conducted to compute the energy of the monitoring signal; thus allowing for the determination of the shear damage index of the composite specimens and the quantitative characterization of the shear failure process. The results indicated that upon the shear failure of the composite specimens, the amplitudes and peak values of the monitoring signals decreased significantly, and the shear failure and damage indices of the composite specimens increased abruptly and approached a value of 1. The feasibility and reliability of the piezoelectric active sensing method, with respect to the monitoring of the shear failure of composite rocks, was therefore experimentally demonstrated in this study.