Aim: Early detection of potential risks for railway, motorway and metro circulation, through fiber sensors system optimizing the maintenance and repair of infrastructures or preventing accidents.

Technologies: Fiber Bragg Grating and Distributed Temperature Sensor

Description: Reliability of infrastructures such as masonry bridges, viaducts and tunnels plays a key role in transportation sectors. Although nowadays infrastructures condition monitoring in transport sectors are mainly implemented through periodic inspections, the availability of all optical fiber sensing solution lead to deploy a complete sensor system enabling extended, flexible and fully automated continuous monitoring. The fiber sensors unique characteristics as for instance lightweight, distributed sensing capabilities and electromagnetic interference immunity are also extremely useful to realize a monitoring system minimizing environmental impact. The sensor reading units can be safely placed in control rooms, which can be located at several tens of km distance from the remote sensing points. Arrays of large number of FBG strain sensors multiplexed along the same single mode optical fiber are directly installed on the infrastructures to be monitored using reliable packaging and installation methods. Distributed temperature measurement can be used at the same time to provide further sensing features as for example early detection of fire in tunnels and/or temperature anomalies along a rail preventing deformation in railways track sections.
Although the system can be used as standalone sensing solution it can also be integrated into existing supervising and control system using standard communication protocols such as OPC, Modbus to provide reliable additional information on the structure to be monitored.