Health monitoring of flexural steel structures based on distributed fibre optic sensors

In our previous study, a distributed long-gauge fibre optic sensing system (with the ability to obtain effective average strain, or macro-strain, distributions) for practical adaptation in civil structural health monitoring was developed and verified. The present paper is devoted to proposing an integrated health monitoring scheme for elastic beam-like structures, where flexure dominates structural responses, based on static testing and measurements using the developed sensors. A series of experimental investigations on steel beams with different levels of damage are first carried out. The static strain measurements from distributed sensors are characterised and some concerns on the data processing and feature extraction are discussed. On the basis of the extracted features, structural health monitoring (SHM) investigations are deployed in three parts: damage identification with no requirement for a structural analytical model, parametric estimation based on finite element (FE) models, and evaluation of structural global behaviour. By comparing to traditional transducers such as linear variable displacement transducers (LVDTs) and foil ‘point’ strain gauges, the ability and ascendancy of the sensors developed here for SHM purposes are verified. A comprehensive health monitoring strategy for steel flexural structures based on the distributed strain sensors array is proposed finally.