Development of the Strain Measurement Calibration Technique for Road Pavement Structural Health Monitoring Applications Using Optical FBG Sensors

With each year, more roads are being built all around the world and a large part of them, which are to encounter high-intensity traffic, are being asphalted. Such a process can be time and finance resource-consuming, thus it is important to ensure maximal longevity of the built construction and provide methods for improved architectural type and used material quality. Such monitoring can be accomplished by realizing road structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. Even more, with the increasing traffic, it is necessary to ensure and improve the safety of all road users as well as offer different solutions (e.g., enumeration of passing vehicles, weigh-in-motion, speed, traffic control, etc.). To do so, the implementation of fiber optical sensors (FOS) within the layers of the road infrastructure can be applied. Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) technology can be a suitable way for such FOS’, to measure different physical parameters that are required by previously mentioned applications and monitoring solutions. Some of those parameters consist of road temperature, vehicle-induced strain or vibration, etc. However, as the asphalting process can not be easily undone or remade, it is necessary to implement such FBG FOS in a way that would support a long technological lifespan as well as - precise measurement and data gathering solution. Thereby, in this research, we have demonstrated and studied the way of FBG FOS integration within the different road architecture layers and proposed the calibration technique for accurate data measurements.