Fiber optic sensors are useful for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) as they can sense environmental change and can react to external stimuli such as mechanical and thermal changes. Embedding Fiber Optic Sensors (FOS) in textiles provides some rigidity to the sensing mechanism as they can be fully integrated with the structures. Additionally, textiles with fiber sensors reduce the overall installation cost. Previously reported fiber optic sensors for traffic monitoring were not fully integrated with infrastructure and some sensors were discretely placed in the structure which prevents continuous data collection process along the entire fiber optic cable. In this study, distributed fiber optic sensor embedded in smart textile with a length of about 28m is presented and installed in a pedestrian bridge located at the University of Massachusetts Lowell with the objective of detecting vibration generated by pedestrians as they walk on the bridge. This paper demonstrates the load change variations in terms of corresponding strain change using Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR). The length of the test was approximately 2.5 hours, and strain changes were recorded at a 30-minute interval. During the test, for minimum traffic on the bridge at the testing time, the recorded strain value was around 16.2με. For larger loads, 2 people walking on top of the textile induced a larger strain change which the record value was 371.2με. Based on the load of the bridge, strain changes results depict that higher loads results in higher strain change and vice versa. This type of distributed fiber optic sensor can be used for the application of real-time traffic monitoring as well as to continuously monitor the structure status of the infrastructure.
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