Reconstruction of Vehicle-Induced Vibration on Concrete Pavement Using Distributed Fiber Optic

Vibration of concrete pavement contains valuable information in the time, space, and frequency domain, which is beneficial to loading characteristics identification and structural health monitoring. However, these multidimensional features have a significant locality and need to measure effectively. This paper proposes a novel method by using distributed fiber optic to measure the temporal, spatial, and spectral distribution of pavement vibration, as well as reconstruct them into a vibration field for feature analysis. First, a vibration monitoring system with designed units was developed to measure the vibration of concrete pavement. Then reconstruction and analysis methods of the vibration field were proposed to process the one-dimensional measured data. Finally, a series of experiments were conducted to validate the performance of the system and methods under different loading types, speeds, magnitude, and positions. According to the results of the impulse loading test, accelerated pavement test, and traffic loading test, it indicates the system can measure the vibration of concrete pavement with sufficient positioning precision (0.33 m), sampling frequency (2500 Hz), and frequency accuracy (<±1 Hz). Also, based on the data processing method, the vibration field can be reconstructed and analyzed effectively to reflect traffic behaviors like braking and lane change.