Application of Fiber Optic Sensors for Monitoring Deflection and Deformation of a Pipeline

Long pipe structures are usually installed in fixtures located with regular intervals or laid underground. Therefore, deflection and deformation could easily occur due to their weight or ground activity. A shape monitoring technique can be used effectively to evaluate the integrity of the pipe structures. Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors, which have an advantage of multiplexing could be used to measure strains at multiple-points of a long structure. In this study, to evaluate the integrity of a pipeline, a shape estimation technique based on strain information was proposed. Furthermore, different experiments were conducted to verify the performance of the proposed technique. Thus, the proposed shape estimation technique can represent the shape according to the deformation of the specimen using the FBGs. Moreover, calculated deflection of the pipeline using the estimation technique showed a good agreement with the actual deflection of the pipeline.