Simultaneous monitoring of the amplitude and location of loading with fiber Bragg grating sensor arrays

Development in sensing technologies and data acquisition systems is making it possible for engineers to acquire the actual state of strains and stresses in structures at construction stage and during their service life. The knowledge of actual internal forces in a structure is key to identification of parameters such as stiffness and support conditions enabling the structural performance to be accurately estimated. This paper reports on the theoretical and experimental work carried out using fibre Bragg gating (FBG) strain sensors, embedded into and attached onto the concrete beam, to obtain the strain distribution of the concrete beam, therefore deduce the information of the applied load.