Stress wave communication in concrete: II. Evaluation of low voltage concrete stress wave communications utilizing spectrally efficient modulation schemes with PZT transducers

Piezoelectric materials, traditionally used for structural health monitoring, have recently been used to implement stress wave communications. Within a protective encasing we fabricate a smart aggregate which enables transmission and reception of modulated stress waves for digital communication within concrete. Our research focuses on building a high efficiency stress wave communication system and comparing the performance of phase shift keying (PSK) with quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). Our experiments evaluate the performance of QPSK and 16QAM implemented with our stress wave communication system at a transmit voltage ranging from 32 dBV to 37 dBV. We also demonstrate the increase in spectral efficiency of 16QAM compared to QPSK.