The sleeve grouting connection is the main connection method of the stressed steel bars in the current prefabricated buildings, and the grouting quality is one of the key factors affecting the performance of prefabricated reinforced concrete structures. In this paper, an active detection method for the sleeve grouting defects based on the stress wave measurement by using the driving and sensing functions of piezoelectric ceramic materials is proposed, and the feasibility is verified by experiments, and its mechanism is analyzed by the numerical simulation. The piezoelectric ceramic patches are pasted on the surface of the sleeve connecting steel bars to measure the output signals of the piezoelectric ceramic sensors on the healthy specimen and the specimen with defects with different sizes, and the wavelet packed energy(WPE) is analyzed and compared. The results show that the grouting defects lead to an increase of the voltage amplitude of the output signals of the piezoelectric ceramic sensors, and the WPE index is related ot the size of the sleeve grouting defect. The proposed method can effectively detect the grouting defects in the sleeve.