Mechanical strain-amplifying transducer for fiber Bragg grating sensors with applications in structural health monitoring

A well-known structural health monitoring method used to detect and locate damage in civil engineering structures is vibration-based damage identification. It typically monitors the civil structure over time to spot slow or sudden changes in its natural frequencies, damping factors or modal displacements. This approach can prove very powerful, but the sensitivity of those properties to local damage can be rather low. In addition, their cross-sensitivity to environmental influences may completely mask the effect of damage, even of severe damage. Instead one can consider the modal strains and curvatures, which are much more sensitive to local damage, but direct (quasi-)distributed monitoring of these quantities with sufficient strain resolution as well as adequate spatial resolution is not straightforward with current measurement techniques. This stems from the small (sub-microstrain) amplitudes of the strain levels occurring following ambient or operational excitation of the structure under test. To deal with this issue we propose and demonstrate a novel mechanical transducer that amplifies the strain applied to an optical fiber Bragg grating sensor with a factor of about 36. In addition the transducer resonance frequencies are sufficiently high to ensure accurate dynamic strain monitoring of civil structures under ambient excitation.