Concrete is pretty great, isn’t it? It’s strong, it’s cheap, it’s easy to use. Let’s hear it for concrete!

On the downside, though, it’s also prone to cracking – if there are swift changes in temperature, for example, or if it’s bearing too much weight. Cracks in concrete structure are annoying at the best of times, but if said structure is holding, say, nuclear waste, they can also be disastrous.

So a team of scientists from North Carolina State University and the University of Eastern Finland have developed plans for a “skin” that would flag up cracks or damage to the concrete’s surface. Their idea involves installing electrodes at the edges of a structure, then applying electrically conductive copper paint across the concrete. The electrodes would emit a constant, low-level current across the surface of the painted “skin”, monitored by a computer. If the surface was weakened, cracked or damaged, the paint would become less conductive, and the computer would sense a change in the signal. You can even analyse the data to produce a map of the damage.

Here’s a cracked piece of concrete, alongside a computer rendering of the damage:

Image: Aku Seppänen.

So far, the researchers have only tried the method out on small, 1m long pieces of concrete, but they’re hoping to test on bigger areas. Dr Mohammad Pour Ghaz, one of the paper’s co-authors, said the team were keen to show the method could work on “real-world structures”.