Abstract

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is an emerging technology that has been rapidly developing in recent years and can be used to quickly set up a low-cost, low-maintenance traffic monitoring system using existing communication cables. Previous studies have used DAS to detect traffic flow and speed, and the overweight of vehicles should also be considered as an important aspect of traffic monitoring. This paper proposes a DAS-based weight measurement method that utilizes elastic sensitive elements to convert load into dynamic strain in a sensing fiber, which allows the inversion and reduction of weight information by monitoring phase changes through a DAS system. The proposed method is validated through theoretical analysis and modeling, and a series of indoor tests are built to verify the method's feasibility. The experimental results demonstrate that the linearity of weight measurement can achieve 99.89% with an error margin of 5%. This work exhibits significant potential for application in intelligent transportation.