The Analysis of Angle Resolution of Stress Vector Sensor Based on Optical Fiber Sensing Cable for High Speed Railway Traffic

With the development of high speed railway traffic, the structure health monitoring for high-speed rail is necessary due to the safety issue. Optical fiber sensing technology is one of the options to solve it. Stress vector information is the important index to make more reasonable judgments about railway safety. However, information sensed by lots of commercial optical sensors is scalar. According to the stress filed distribution of rail, this paper proposes a new type of stress vector sensor based on optical fiber sensing cable (OFSC) with a symmetrical seven optical fibers structure and analyzes the relations between angle resolution and distance between adjacent of optical fibers through finite-element software (ANSYS) simulation. Through reasonable distance configuration, the angle resolution of the OFSC can be improved, and thus stress vector information, including the stress magnitude and the angle of stress, can be more accurately obtained. The simulation results are helpful to configure OFSC for angle resolution improvement in actual practice, and increase the safety factor in high speed railway structure health monitoring.