Traditional and innovative techniques for existing buildings monitoring

To date, existing constructions are exposed to multiple factors that may influence their preservation state, making them increasingly vulnerable and prone to significant structural damage. To counteract this trend, prevention and maintenance require the use of focused techniques in order to prevent and to avoid the out of service of a construction or, even worse, the occurrence of catastrophic scenarios, such as sudden collapse, with human lives risk. A valid tool for assessing the current condition and performance of existing constructions through real-time data collection and analysis is the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). It permits of continuously monitor a construction, providing useful information on its current status and on possible configuration variations over the time. This paper provides a state-of-art overview of traditional and innovative techniques to date available for structural monitoring, with particular regards to existing buildings. To this scope a comparison of some techniques is discussed, also highlighting their strengths and weaknesses starting from data available in literature. Then, the paper discusses on possible new innovative monitoring techniques based on self-sensing materials, that may result more effective and less invasive than the traditional ones.