Abstract

Construction, revitalization, preservation and maintenance of resilient and sustainable civil structures and infrastructure represent important challenges for society of 21^st century. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is emerging branch of engineering which can greatly assist in meeting these challenges by providing in-time actionable information on structural health condition and performance. Fiber Optic Sensors (FOS) offer two unique strain sensing tools for SHM: long-gauge sensors and truly distributed sensors. These FOS enable two novel SHM methods (respectively): global structural monitoring and integrity monitoring. The aim of this tutorial is to present commercially available long-gauge and distributed FOS, to briefly introduce theory behind the two novel methods enabled by FOS, and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods through real-life applications.

© 2015 Optical Society of America