Fiber-optic Smart Structures for Monitoring and Managing the Health of Transportation Infrastructures

The monitoring of transportation infrastructure health is currently reliant on transportation maintenance teams. Scheduled and periodic inspections of most infrastructures are performed by manual and visual operations, which are generally time consuming and costly procedures. The use of fiber-optic sensor technology makes it possible to realize continuous, real-time and automatic health monitoring for transportation infrastructures. In this report, we present the research results of the feasibility study on using fiber-optic sensors for transportation infrastructural health monitoring. Since the topic spans many disciplines, our goal is limited to providing a basic conceptual framework. We begin by reviewing the prerequisite topics of structural health monitoring and fiber-optic sensors, including a brief review of point and distributed fiber-optic sensor technologies. We then provide a comprehensive review of key fiber-optic sensors which may be used in transportation infrastructure monitoring. We discuss point fiber-optic sensors first, and then distributed fiber optic sensors. Performances of each sensor are discussed in the context of transportation infrastructure monitoring applications. We conclude the report with observations on the current directions of research in the field of fiber-optic sensors for transportation infrastructure health monitoring and we propose future research plans for the implementation of fiberoptic sensor technology.