Research of a Fiber Sensor Based on Fiber Bragg Grating for Road Surface Monitoring

Abstract

Road infrastructure is a key public asset because it benefits the social and economic development of any country. It plays an important role in the development of the industrial complex and the production sector, and the surfaces of transport roads should be of high quality and have a long service life. Road infrastructure, like all infrastructure, requires preservation, maintenance and repair. There are special requirements for roadways that must be observed during construction or repair. The uncertainty of the composition, temperature sensitivity and viscoelastic characteristics of road materials make the structural analysis of pavement very difficult compared to other civil structures, such as bridges, tunnels and buildings. For this reason, the question of how to improve fiber sensors based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) arose. The novelty of this study is to modernize fiber sensors based on FBG so that they display deformation, stress and displacement, temperature and other parameters with much greater accuracy, which would provide a reliable scientific basis for modifying the theory, as well as the use of a fiber sensor based on FBG for simultaneous measurement of deformation and temperature when monitoring the road surface. This article is devoted to a detailed study of the use of fiber-optic sensors (FOS) based on fiber Bragg grating for road surface monitoring. Such a fiber sensor, consisting of a fiber Bragg grating and a pair of grids, can offer the possibility of simultaneous measurement of deformation and temperature for monitoring the pavement. Temperature and deformation measurements were carried out by installing a sensor on the surface of a made asphalt sample. The built-in fiber sensor based on FBG provides important information about how the pavement structure can withstand the load and subsidence of soil and implement road safety and stability measures in a timely manner to evaluate and predict the service life of the pavement. The results of the study showed that the synchronicity, repeatability and linearity of the characteristics of the fiber sensor are excellent. The difference between the experimental and theoretical results was about 7%. Thus, based on the results of the obtained data, the fiber sensor on the FBG can be used for monitoring and designing road surfaces and in general transport infrastructure.