Functionality Enhancement of Industrialized Optical Fiber Sensors and System Developed for Full-Scale Pavement Monitoring

• Main Authors: Huaping Wang, Wanqiu Liu, Jianping He, Xiaoying Xing, Dandan Cao, Xipeng Gao, Xiaowei Hao, Hongwei Cheng, Zhi Zhou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2014-05-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: pavements; functionality enhancement of industrialized optical fiber sensors; self-healing network system; full-scale monitoring
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/14/5/8829

Pavements always play a predominant role in transportation. Health monitoring of pavements is becoming more and more significant, as frequently suffering from cracks, rutting, and slippage renders them prematurely out of service. Effective and reliable sensing elements are thus in high demand to make prognosis on the mechanical properties and occurrence of damage to pavements. Therefore, in this paper, various types of functionality enhancement of industrialized optical fiber sensors for pavement monitoring are developed, with the corresponding operational principles clarified in theory and the performance double checked by basic experiments. Furthermore, a self-healing optical fiber sensing network system is adopted to accomplish full-scale monitoring of pavements. The application of optical fiber sensors assembly and self-healing network system in pavement has been carried out to validate the feasibility. It has been proved that the research in this article provides a valuable method and meaningful guidance for the integrity monitoring of civil structures, especially pavements.