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The substantial progresses in fiber-optic communications in combination with the increasing economic and political interest in structural health monitoring have led to a commercial establishment of distributed Brillouin sensing. The sensor systems, mainly based on the time-domain techniques, have been successfully implemented in the areas such as pipeline leak detection, geohazard effects, and ground movement detection.
This chapter introduces a further advancement in the area of Brillouin sensing in the frequency domain. The so-called Brillouin optical frequency-domain analysis (BOFDA) offers crucial perspectives in terms of dynamic range and cost efficiency.
The main principle of the frequency-domain approach takes advantage of the reversibility between the time and frequency domain given by a Fourier transform in the analysis of linear systems. The hereby presented overview gives a summary of the benefits and challenges of frequency-domain measurements closely tied to the narrowband recording of the complex transfer function. This function relates the counterpropagating pump and probe laser light along the sensor fiber providing the pulse response of the measurement system by applying the inverse Fourier transform (IFT). The strain or temperature distribution can be then determined from the retrieved Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) profile along the fiber.
The ever more ambitious strategic goals of meeting the requirements in ensuring technical safety and security of civil structures have resulted in flourishing development of innovative structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies for early damage diagnosis and prognosis. At the same time, implementing SHM systems provides tangible economic benefits derived from lower life-cycle costs associated with reduction in the maintenance, repair and insurance expenses. Due to the large size and harsh environmental conditions common to most civil structures, the broad range of favorable physical-mechanical properties of POFs allow for customized monitoring solutions for a wide variety of applications.
In addition to common SHM-related advantages of optical fibers including their electromagnetic immunity, small size, lightweight as well as spark-free and non-conductive characteristics, POFs offer better bending and fracture resistance then their glass-counterparts. Particularly, the improved robustness of POFs, their ease of handling, low Young’s Modulus and high elastic limit of 10% compared to 1% in silica glass [1] are relevant to practical applications. Depending on the composition, dopants, drawing process and geometry [2], strain measurement up to 45% [3] or even above 100% [4,5] has been demonstrated with standard POFs. Therefore, the dominant market expected for POF sensors includes monitoring of high-strain-rate deformations in earthwork structures, crack detection in concrete and masonry structures [6] or overstressing in high-rise steel structures exposed to moisture, corrosion, leakage, fatigue, vibration, fire, overflow, earthquake and intentional damage. For fracture monitoring within concrete structures, the sensory usage of POFs becomes especially favorable since the extremely alkaline environment of concrete mixtures is well known to be corrosive to standard silica glass optical fibers (GOFs) [1,7].
Most of advanced distributed sensing techniques are commonly based on Rayleigh backscatter reflectometry using commercially available multimode (MM) POFs. Such typical MM POFs range from a step-index (SI) poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) POF having a core diameter of 1 mm to a low-loss graded-index (GI) perfluorinated (PF) POF based on poly(perfluorobutenyl-vinylether) also known as CYTOP [8] with a 50 µm core diameter. The relatively low optical attenuation value of 30 dB/km at 1.3 µm [9,10] makes PFGI POFs also interesting for distributed Brillouin sensing [11-14]. Compared to GOFs, PFGI POFs offer better potential for temperature measurement and have comparably low theoretical attenuation limit [15]. Therefore, POF-based distributed Brillouin sensing is expected to play an important role in the future of SHM, especially at high-strain ranges. The significance of the Brillouin measurment technique can be also enhanced by further development of the single-mode (SM) POFs which are still subject of research and are used for coherent detection techniques [6]. Furthermore, SM PMMA POFs have been characterized in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer setup for strain values up to 15.8% [16,17].
The current development of SM perfluorinated and microstructured POFs (mPOFs) represents an immense promise for quasi-distributed dynamic measurement at high strain levels based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) technology. While SM mPOFs with optical losses of about 1 dB/m can be fabricated [6], the SM PF POFs presented by Zhou et al. feature low attenuation of even less than 0.2 dB/m in the wavelength range of 1.41 µm to 1.55 µm [18]. At the same time, the SM PF POFs have the potential for improved thermal stability compared to their PMMA counterparts [19].
This whole chapter provides a comprehensive overview on current POF-based sensing principles and SHM technologies, highlighting their diverse applications in civil engineering structures. In the application-related context, close attention is paid to the development of smart sensor-based geotextiles and geogrids. Such geosynthetics-integrated distributed POF sensors have proven to be a promising solution for two- or even tree-dimensional monitoring of critical high mechanical deformations in both geotechnical and masonry structures. Moreover, geosynthetics in the form of nonwoven geotextiles as well as polymer-based geogrids used as carrier materials for POF sensors enable optimized load transfer from the monitored structure to the measuring fiber without losing their original functionality. In other words, smart geosynthetics provide a cost-efficient dual solution for, on the one hand, well-established increase of structure stability and decrease of erosion effects, on the other hand, early-warning and detection capabilities in the prevention and elimination of potential hazards and lasting damages.