Abstract
As buried infrastructure in North America and around the world reaches the end of its service life, engineers and infrastructure managers will require an improved understanding of the performance of both deteriorated pipes and repair techniques. To develop this improved understanding, sensing technologies that enable the full pipe behavior to be measured, rather than a small number of localized discrete measurements, are required. A possible solution to this problem is to use distributed fiber optic strain sensors. To this end, a series of buried pipe tests were undertaken on steel, concrete, and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipes instrumented with distributed fiber optic strain sensors. The distributed measurements were in agreement with conventional strain gauges, but enabled the full strain distribution around the circumference of the pipe to be measured. This allowed localized behavior that would have been missed with conventional strain gauges to be detected and quantified. In addition, the choice of fiber optic cable proved to be an important consideration due to a trade-off between measurement accuracy and sensor robustness.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program of the Transportation Research Board (Washington, DC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Ministry of Research and Innovation Ontario. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors. The authors would also like to thank Sean Heidstra and KWH Pipe, Robert Cumming and Lafarge North America Inc., and Dave Pearson and the Ministry of Transportation Ontario for donating materials used in this research. Finally, the research would not have been possible without the assistance of Graeme Boyd, Van Thien Mai, and Ryan Regier.
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Published In
Journal of Pipeline Systems Engineering and Practice
Volume 6 • Issue 4 • November 2015
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 15, 2014
Accepted: Dec 1, 2014
Published online: Jan 9, 2015
Discussion open until: Jun 9, 2015
Published in print: Nov 1, 2015
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