Carbon fiber based composite material is of considerable interest for the replacement of steel in large concrete structures, such as bridges, where corrosion is a serious problem. A new two-span concrete highway bridge built in the city of Calgary in 1993 is the first in the world to use carbon fiber composite prestressing tendons in several of its precast concrete deck support girders. We have instrumented a number of these girders with an array of fiber optic intracore Bragg grating sensors in order to monitor the changes in the internal strain that take place over an extended period of time. Afour-channel fiber laser demodulation system was developed for interrogating the set of Bragg grating sensors embedded within the bridge girders. This demodulation system was demonstrated to be rugged, compact and transportable to the bridge construction site where it allowed changes in the internal strain on all three types of prestressing tendon (steel and two types of carbon fiber composite) to be tracked over several months. The same set of structurally integrated Bragg grating sensors has also been used to measure the change in the internal strain within the deck girders arising from both static and dynamic loading of the bridge with a 21 ton truck. This first permanent testbed for structurally integrated Bragg grating sensors demonstrates the feasibility of building into new bridges fiber optic long-term structural monitoring sensing technology that will allow the use of these advanced composite materials to be monitored in a manner not previously practical. The strain information available from this type of monitoring system will assist engineers in their assessment of new materials and innovative design features, and has a potential role in maintenance and repair activities.

Fiber optic Bragg grating technology offers unrivaled sensing versatility combined with the promise of extremely compact, rugged and low-cost integrated optoelectronic microchip demodulation systems. We show that a tunable laser can be used to demodulate each of the different sensing modalities: short and long gage fiber optic strain sensors; serial and parallel multiplexed fiber grating sensor arrays and truly distributed sensing based on intragrating strain profile mapping. We also show that distributed strain sensing is not limited by the length of a single Bragg grating. We demonstrate that Fourier transform analysis combined with tunable laser interrogation of a string of gratings permits distributed sensing over distances of about a meter without the need for high-cost time division multiplexing or producing each grating with a different reference wavelength as required by wavelength division multiplexing.

In this paper, an optical fiber pressure sensor cascading a diaphragm-assisted Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) and a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) is proposed and demonstrated. The sensor comprises an optical fiber, a fused-silica ferrule, and a fused-silica diaphragm. We use a femtosecond laser firstly to fabricate a pit on the end face of the ferrule and then investigate the laser heat conduction welding and deep penetration welding technology for manufacturing the seepage pressure sensor of the all-fused-silica material. We develop a sensor based on a monolithic structured FPI without adhesive bonding by means of all-laser-welding. The pressure characteristics of the sensor have good linearity at different temperatures. Also, the monolithic structured sensor possesses excellent resolution, hysteresis, and long-term stability. The environmental temperature obtained by the FBG is employed to compensate for the difference in seepage pressure at different temperatures, and the difference in seepage pressure responses at different temperatures is shown to be very small after temperature compensation.

Long gage length integrated strain sensing is frequently required in structural measurement applications. An optical fiber structural sensing system based on a low-coherence Michelson interferometer was built and shown to be of low cost and capable of absolute measurement and moderate accuracy for quasistatic measurement of strain or structural deformations. This type of sensor was found to be useful for monitoring the hoop-strain around structures like shells, cylinders and columns. We have also shown that localization of the sensing section of an optical fiber can be achieved through the use of one or more Bragg gratings. In effect, the sensing section of the optical fiber acts as a Fabry-P érot interferometer. When a low-coherence source is used, interference is only attained when the cavity length of this Fabry-P érot matches the optical path difference (OPD) between the two mirrors of a fiber optic Michelson interferometer. Changes in the sensing length are determined from the commensurate changes that must be made to the reference Michelson interferometer to maintain some fixed degree of interference. Recently, we have developed a novel single-ended localized fiber optic sensor for making absolute strain measurements over arbitrary (cm to m) long gage lengths using a tunable laser. The sensor's gage is again defined between two in-fiber broad-bandwidth Bragg gratings or one grating and the mirror coated end of the same fiber. For this sensing system the change in the OPD of the sensing Fabry-P érot interferometer with respect to the OPD of a fixed Michelson reference interferometer is determined from the measurement of the phase change, recorded by a low-pass filtered photodetector, associated with a known sweep of the laser wavelength. This tunable laser demodulation scheme avoids the use of moving parts and lends itself to a compact, portable system. This type of sensor is particularly well suited for certain structural applications, such as monitoring the time variation in the hoop-stress in composite material wraps used to rehabilitate and strengthen corroded or earthquake damaged concrete columns.

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