Stress optical fiber sensor using light coupling between two laterally fused multimode optical fibers.

A stress optical fiber sensor was manufactured and tested. It uses light coupling between two parallel and laterally fused, all-silica multimode optical fibers along a cladding length of a few centimeters. This sensor is dedicated to the measurement of high values of stress. A theoretical model was developed using the mode coupling and the perturbation theory to calculate the global coupling coefficient of light. A serial optical fiber sensor network interrogated by the time-division multiplexing method was realized and tested. The major applications of this sensor are control and monitoring of civil engineering structures and concretes.