A highly resolving fibre optic sensor based on the Fabry-Perot technology has been developed for
integration into concrete piles with the purpose of static and dynamic pile testing as well as monitoring. The
paper presents the design of the sensitive element and first results of large-scale model pile tests.
Reinforced concrete piles are used in case of structures that are constructed on soft ground to transfer the loads into deeper strata with sufficient bearing capacity. In order to determine the pile’s behavior and possible damage, static and dynamic pile tests are carried out. Dynamic measurements taken from the pile head can show the bearing behavior and structural integrity by using the theory of wave propagation. In order to receive more precise information about the pile features, now, a string of sensors is embedded at different levels of the pile. A fiber optic strain wave sensor, based on the extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometer (EFPI), has already been developed and tested in full-scale field tests by Schallert (2010). It was possible to detect the introduced deformation caused by the static load and the dilatational wave during dynamic loading. Although the full-scale tests were successful, the engineering design of the sensor body left room - from the economical point of view - to be optimized. After laboratory tests with the optimized sensor, a cast-in-situ bored pile has been built at the BAM Test Site Technical Safety in Horstwalde, South of Berlin. Additionally to the EFPI sensors, fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors, temperature sensors and resistance strain gauge (RSG) sensors are embedded in order to compare the signals with each other. In this paper, the modified sensor and the Setup of the cast-in-situ bored pile along with results of dynamic tests are shown.
Structural Health Monitoring of composite materials gains in importance with the increasing use of Composite structures for safety-related applications, e.g. in aerospace. Because of the material properties of composites, defects often occur inside the structures and raise the demand for integrated sensors. The advantages of optical fibres predestine them not only for the surface-application on composite structures but also for the Integration into composite structures. Even without quasi-distributed sensors such as FBGs or LPGs, the optical fibre itself can be used to measure the structure and occurring events over the entire fibre length by distributed sensing techniques. This paper presents the surface-application of polyimide coated silica optical fibres onto PEEK specimens and the integration of copper and polyimide coated silica optical fibres into an AS-4/PEEK Composite to be used as distributed fibre optic sensors for SHM. Results from distributed measurements by optical backscatter reflectometry based on Rayleigh backscattering are shown.
Static and dynamic pile tests are carried out to determine the load bearing capacity and the quality of reinforced concrete piles. As part of a round robin test to evaluate dynamic load tests, structure integrated fibre optic strain sensors were used to receive more detailed information about the strains along the pile length compared to conventional measurements at the pile head. This paper shows the instrumentation of the pile with extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometers sensors and fibre Bragg gratings sensors together with the results of the conducted static load test as well as the dynamic load Tests and pile integrity tests.