Fiber Optic Sensor Installation for Monitoring of 4 Span Model Bridge in UCF

Fiber optic sensors can give us valuable data to assess the health of a structure, known as Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). Bridges, being critical structures, are monitored with different sensors such as strain measurements mostly at discrete locations with resistive based sensors. Fiber optic sensors can be used to sense the strain status by using one sensing optical fiber line. Recently, fiber optic Bragg grating sensors are a representative of point sensing technique, and also fiber optic BOTDR or BOTDA sensor is a unique measurement technique to sense fully distributed strain through the sensing optical fiber. Therefore, in this paper, fiber optic Bragg grating(FBG) sensor, fiber optic BOTDR(Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry) sensor, fiber optic BOTDA(Brillouin optical time domain analysis) sensor are installed on 4 span model bridge to study distributed sensing and data analysis to acquire some useful data to identify bridge condition assessment.