Multimode optical fiber strain monitoring for smart infrastructures

The in-service monitoring of civil infrastructures is an important task required to achieve their smart operation. This task requires the installation of sensors to continuously check and control the structures' status in order to fulfil the demanded operating conditions and avoid the occurrence of malfunctions. This work presents an investigation of the use of multimode optical fiber sensors in detecting strain and vibration of infrastructures. The multimode fiber sensor is composed of a single mode - multimode - single mode concatenated fiber structure. To explore its practical application for strain monitoring, the sensor is used to measure the strain on a pressurized pipe and its performance compared with the well-developed fiber Bragg grating sensor. The detuning of spectral features of the multimode sensor transmission with increasing pipe pressure is found to have a good linearity (R-2 similar to 0.95) and is more sensitive to strain compared to that of the fiber Bragg grating. (c) 2023 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study investigates the use of multimode optical fiber sensors in detecting strain and vibration of infrastructures. The performance of the multimode sensor is compared with the well-developed fiber Bragg grating sensor by measuring strain on a pressurized pipe. The results show that the spectral features of the multimode sensor have good linearity and higher sensitivity to strain compared to the fiber Bragg grating.