A Uniform Strain Transfer Scheme for Accurate Distributed Optical Fiber Strain Measurements in Civil Structures

Abstract

We report a screw-like package design for an embeddable distributed optical fiber strain sensor for civil engineering applications. The screw-like structure is the exterior support for an optical fiber sensor. The bare optical fiber is embedded and secured in a longitudinal groove of the screw-like package using a rigid adhesive. Our packaging scheme prevents damage to the bare optical fiber and ensures that the packaged sensor is accurately and optimally sensing strain fields in civil structures. Moreover, our screw-like design has an equal area in a cross-section perpendicular to and along the screw axis, so strain field distributions are metered faithfully along the length of the embedded optical fiber. Our novel screw-like package optical fiber sensor, interfaced to a Rayleigh scattering-based optical frequency domain reflectometer system enables undistorted, accurate, robust, and spatially-distributed strain measurements in bridges, tunnels, pipelines, buildings, etc. along structural dimensions extending from centimeters to kilometers.

Document type: Article

Full document

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/inventions3020030 under the license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by

• https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/3/2/30/pdf under the license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

• http://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/3/2/30/pdf,

http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/inventions3020030 under the license cc-by

• https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/3/2/30/pdf,

https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/3/2/30,

https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4840&context=ele_comeng_facwork,

https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/ele_comeng_facwork/3834,

https://works.bepress.com/jie-huang/104,

https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2803556421 under the license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/