Functionality Enhancement of Industrialized Optical Fiber Sensors and System Developed for Full-Scale Pavement Monitoring

Abstract

Pavements always play a predominant role in transportation. Health monitoring of pavements is becoming more and more significant, as frequently suffering from cracks, rutting, and slippage renders them prematurely out of service. Effective and reliable sensing elements are thus in high demand to make prognosis on the mechanical properties and occurrence of damage to pavements. Therefore, in this paper, various types of functionality enhancement of industrialized optical fiber sensors for pavement monitoring are developed, with the corresponding operational principles clarified in theory and the performance double checked by basic experiments. Furthermore, a self-healing optical fiber sensing network system is adopted to accomplish full-scale monitoring of pavements. The application of optical fiber sensors assembly and self-healing network system in pavement has been carried out to validate the feasibility. It has been proved that the research in this article provides a valuable method and meaningful guidance for the integrity monitoring of civil structures, especially pavements.

FBG‐Based Sensing for Structural Health Monitoring of Road Infrastructure

“…Essentially, because the damage done to the roads might not be initially easily and visually observed as well as evaluated, it is important to detect the damage in the early stages of its development [1]. The most common failure modes in asphalt pavement include rutting, cracking, and subsidence [2] caused by channelized traffic and pavement overloading [3].…”

“…Thus, the urgency for SHM implementation with time has increased and still is nowadays. However, the complexity of pavement materials due to composition uncertainty, temperature sensitivity, viscoelasticity characteristics [2], and level of compaction [7] is an issue hampering the development of effective means for damage detection and monitoring of road structures.…”

Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors in Three Asphalt Pavement Layers

“…It is challenging to devise an efficient method to determine realistic mechanical properties of pavement [4]. For this reason, since the early 1990s, there has been interest in improving all kinds of sensors to exhibit strain, stress, and displacement with a much higher precision [5].…”

A Research on Low Modulus Distributed Fiber Optical Sensor for Pavement Material Strain Monitoring

“…Wang et al used two grid blocks to fix both ends of the FBG sensor. Strain sensing is performed by elongating the distance between two grid blocks [ 17 ]. Zhou et al combine FBG sensors with a stainless annulus and FRP (fiber reinforced polymer).…”