Monitoring the energy efficiency of buildings with Raman DTS and embedded optical fiber cables

Abstract

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to promote energy savings in the building sector, a project named Batimetre has been set-up, to measure parameters affecting building energy consumption. For the first time, optical fibers have been deployed on internal and external faces of two experimental houses, designed for low energy consumption. With a DTS Raman system, these cables provide a distributed measurement of walls temperature every meter and every two minutes. Such instrumentation is able to deliver a very large number of data at a reduced operating cost. It allows to isolate thermal phenomena in dynamic thermal simulation tools, and to compare several intermediate predicted and measured parameters.

A distributed heat pulse sensor network for thermo-hydraulic monitoring of the soil subsurface

“…and building observations (e.g. Ferdinand et al 2014). It utilises the interaction of laser light with the silica core of a fibre-optic cable and applies time-domain reflectometry to determine soil temperature at discrete sections along the cable.…”