Low-cost optical interrogator system for structural health monitoring

Optical fiber sensors have great potential for application in civil construction, especially in the field of structural health monitoring. However, one of the barriers to the diffusion of these sensors is allied to the fact that their implementation is quite expensive, mainly due to the high price of commercial optical interrogators. Therefore, the present work seeks to develop a low-cost optical interrogation system. For this, the present study proposes the development of this system based on the use of tunable filters and edge filters in the monitoring of low and high frequencies, and consequent digital processing of the collected signals through the find_picks algorithm and the Fourier transform. As a result, it was possible to observe the adequate functioning of the tunable filters, with the validation of the system using a FBG, and a previous simulation for the edge filter system with frequencies superior to 100 kHz. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.