A novel fiber optic concrete sensor based on EFPI

Abstract

In this paper, a novel fiber optic concrete sensor based on extrinsic fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer (EFPI) is designed and analyzed. Two fiber ends are inserted into a glass capillary and encapsulated into a cement cylinder to act as the sensor head. In this way, the cement cylinder itself is the sensor head instead of the traditional steel tube, which makes it very convenient to embed the sensor head into the concrete, because the cement consists with the concrete well. Based on the theory of white light interferometry and the theory of elasticity, the wavelength modulation method and the strain transfer are analyzed theoretically. The demodulation system is also introduced in this paper. The experiment being made by our research group is aimed at testing the consistency, stability, reliability and the sensitivity of the fiber optic sensor. The sensor head of the cement cylinder is embedded into a model ferroconcrete beam together with traditional strain gauges. The experiment is carried out using the PEM-500A hydraulic pulsation fatigue test machine after 2 million stress circles. The readout of the fibre optic sensor and the strain gauges is recorded and made a contrast. It can be found from the result that the fibre optic sensors have good stability and reliability, the accuracy for the fibre optic sensor is better than 0.5 micro-strain, which shows that the sensor can meet the demand of the long-term monitoring of large-size concrete structure.