Tensile and Compressive Strain Measurement with the Distributed Brillouin Scattering Sensor (CAT#: STEM-ST-0090-YJL)

Introduction

The potential for a monitoring system to reduce operational maintenance costs by identifying problems at an early stage, and to verify the effectiveness of repair procedures, is clearly significant. Installing effective monitoring equipment and processing the collected data represents a considerable challenge that is being actively pursued worldwide. To ensure structural security of bridges, periodic monitoring, maintenance, and restoration are required. Accurate knowledge of the behavior of bridges is becoming more important as new structures tend to be lighter, and as increasing numbers of existing bridges are required to remain in service beyond their designed service life. Monitoring, both in the long and short term, helps increase understanding of the real behavior of a bridge and aids in planning maintenance interventions. In the long term, static monitoring requires an accurate and very stable system, which can relate deformation measurements taken over long periods of time.