Monitoring of railway embankment settlement with fiber-optic pulsed time-of-flight radar.

This paper deals with a fiber-optic pulsed time-of-flight (PTOF) laser radar used for monitoring the settlement of a railway embankment. The operating principle is based on evaluating the changes in the lengths of the fiber-optic cables embedded in the embankment by measuring the time separation of the optical pulses reflected from both ends of the sensor fiber. The advantage of this method is that it integrates the elongation of the whole sensor, and many sensor fibers can be connected in series. In a field test, seven polyurethane-coated optical cables were installed in a railway embankment and used as 20-m long sensors. The optical timing pulses were created using specially polished optical connectors. The measured precision was 0.28 ps, which corresponds 1.8 μstrain elongation using a 20 m long sensor fiber, using an averaged value of 10,000 pulses for a single measurement value. The averaged elongation value of all sensors was used for cancelling out the effect of temperature variation on the elongation value of each individual sensor. The functionality of the method was tested by digging away a 7.5 m long and approximately 18 mm high section of sand below one sensor. It was measured as a +3 mm change in the length of the sensor fiber, which matched well with the theoretically calculated elongation value, 2.9 mm. The sensor type proved to be strong but flexible enough for this type of use.