Fibre Bragg gratings sensor for monitoring distance changes between structural elements inside a building

The distance changes between structural elements inside a building (e.g. walls, pillars, stairs, etc.) ought to be monitored, especially in seismic-prone areas, in order to assess its stability. Fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensors are now the most interesting choice for this purpose, since several gratings can be included in the fibre, resulting in a quasi-distributed sensor, which can be illuminated using a single light source and interrogated simply by a single optical spectrum analyzer (OSA), using wavelength multiplexing. The paper deals with such a sensor, which was installed for monitoring the distance changes in a construction joint between two building blocks inside the University "Politehnica" of Bucharest. Since this city is placed in a seismic-prone area, we use a fast scanning OSA, so that the dynamic behavior of the monitored construction joint is expected to be captured during future earthquakes. Slow drifts of the construction joint width will be also monitored. The paper describes the sensor structure and working principle, the experimental tests and main parameters evaluation. The reported sensor is temperature compensated. It has an estimated distance resolution better or equal to 10 μm, and a linearity of+0.2%...-0.35% for displacements up to 0.55 mm. Simulated dynamic tests are also reported.