Full scale brillouin sensing technique based smart parallel wire stay cable

Since the traditional point or quasi-distributed sensors can not cover the full scale monitoring of cables in service, a new kind of smart cable based on the Brillouin sensing technology is developed by combining the optical fiber-fiber reinforced polymer rebar (named as FRP-OF rebar) with the able wires. Full scale cable's static experimental results show that the FRP-OF can reveal the stress distribution along the cable under 60% of the broken cable load. And the repeatability is very good. The cable load gotten from the average monitored strain agrees well with the controlled force under error of 5%. This kind of smart cable shows perfect advantages such as durability, anti-corrosion, electro-magnetic resistance, low cost and fully-distribution sensing and so on, which can meet the long-term on-line health monitoring for practical cable.