Strain Monitoring of Widening Cement Concrete Pavement Subjected to Differential Settlement of Foundation

Abstract

This paper describes the use of a sensor based on a fiber Bragg grating (FBG), which is capable of reducing strain transfer errors, to measure the strain features within the top and bottom layers of a cement concrete pavement subject to different degrees of foundation settlement. Based on measured data, the characteristics of the distribution and the variation in the structure strain were analyzed in detail. By comparing the measured results with those obtained by means of finite element analysis, the proposed FBG-based sensor assembly was found to be capable of effectively monitoring the strain distribution in a cement concrete pavement, thus proving that the improved optical fiber grating strain sensor is a very promising solution for road pavement structural health monitoring.