Embedded optical fiber sensors in civil engineering composite structures: Fid-Bau Portal

Embedded optical fiber sensors in civil engineering composite structures

Chapeleau, Xavier / Drissi-Habti, Monssef / Tomonori, Tomiyama

Fiber reinforced composite materials have been around for over 60 years. They are currently used in a wide variety of industrial applications. Decks for highways, bridges and pedestrian walkways have been built with this material in Japan, Europe and North America. The major benefits for civil engineering structures are high strength, Light weight, high corrosion resistance, controllable thermal properties, high formability and tailoring. Using composites has a number of advantages for civil engineering because of their durability, fatigue resistance and easy maintenance. Compared with steel and other traditional construction materials, composites have considerable ecological and technological advantages. Composites are increasingly used for tanks, slabs, pipes, walkways, bridge decks, strengthening concrete columns, buildings, gratings, reinforcing bars for concrete and so on. In addition, new applications of composites are continuously coming to the market. In this article, we focused our attention on optical fiber sensors, which are well adapted for embedding in composite materials made by pultrusion. There are different types and techniques of optical fiber sensors that are complementary to each other. In the first part of this article, we reviewed the local measurement techniques such as Fabry-Perot interferometers and fiber Bragg gratings. In the second part, we described the Brillouin and Rayleigh technologies, which allow distributed measurements.