Pipeline monitoring by Brillouin-scattering-based fibre optic distributed strain sensors: pipeline wall thickness detection

Distributed Brillouin scattering sensor system was employed to measure the hoop strain in an internally pressurized steel pipe with wall thinning due to erosion. The difference of Brillouin frequency shift from regions that have different degree of wall thickness lost can be observed on strain distribution. The strain from thin wall region is higher than that from the thick wall region. Therefore, the inner wall thinning can be discriminated from the corresponding strain measurements, which shows that fiber optic sensor technology based on distributed Brillouin scattering offers the great potential as a "nervous system" for infrastructure elements that allow high performance, cost effective health and damage assessment systems to be achieved.