Monitoring trucks, cars and joggers on the horsetail falls bridge using fiber optic grating strain sensors

Blue Road Research installed fiber optic grating sensors on the Horsetail Falls bridge in 1998 to monitor static strain in support of health monitoring of the bridge. In November 1999 Blue Road Research utilized high speed, high sensitivity fiber grating demodulation systems on this bridge to monitor the weight arid speed of traffic. Sensitivity levels used were sufficiently high that joggers could be detected easily as well as people walking on the bridge. This paper provides an overview of these recent tests that show both health monitoring and traffic monitoring functions can be performed on a bridge using the same set of fiber grating strain sensors.