Plastic optical fibre sensor for damage detection in offshore structures

Abstract

It is important to ensure the safe and reliable use of massive engineering structures such as offshore platforms, including all aspects of safety and design code compliance. Although routine inspection is an integral part of the safety protocol in operating and maintaining these structures, regular assessment of the effectiveness and efficiency of existing safety evaluation methods is clearly desired in view of emerging technologies for structural health monitoring of engineering structures. The recent advancement in plastic optical fibre (POF) materials and processing render POF sensors an attractive alternative to glass-based optical fibre sensors as they offer much greater being flexibility, high resistance to fracture and hence the ease in their handling and installation. In this paper, some preliminary results demonstrating the use of plastic optical fibre sensors for damage detection and structural health monitoring for offshore and marine-related applications will be summarized. In this study, POF will be used for crack detection in tubular steel specimens in conjunction with a high-resolution photon-counting optical time-domain reflectrometry (v-OTDR). Although the use of OTDR technique is an established method in the telecommunication industry, this study is new in that it is now possible, with the availability of v-OTDR and graded-index perfluorinated POF, to detect and locate the crack position in the host structure to within 10 cm accuracy or better. It will also be shown that this technique could readily be configured to monitor crack growth in steel tubular members. © 2010 SPIE.