Distributed monitoring of buried pipelines with Brillouin fiber optic sensors

The article presented here pertains to the distributed monitoring of the buried bell-and-spigot water pipelines. This study involved the monitoring scheme of distributed sensors and the experimental verification of a full-scale pipeline buried in a large soil trough. The sensor topology was proposed to fully describe the spatial deformation of the pipeline with Brillouin optical time domain analysis (BOTDA) sensors. Full-scale tests on buried pipeline were conducted in a large soil trough, simulating the non-uniform bedding under the pipeline. The longitudinal strains of the buried pipeline were monitored by the distributed Brillouin sensors for different load cases. The experimental results demonstrate that the distributed monitoring method based on Brillouin fiber optic sensors can detect the structural condition of the buried bell-and-spigot water pipelines.