Project description
Optical fibre cable for smart structural health monitoring
The growing demand for advanced telecommunications infrastructure over the past decades has resulted in a global network of over 5 billion kilometres of installed optical fibre cables. Many of these traverse undersea regions and areas beyond the reach of conventional sensors. The EU-funded ECSTATIC project seeks to leverage this extensive network by developing a groundbreaking interferometry- and polarisation-based methodology for vibration and acoustic fibre-optic sensing technologies. This innovative approach will significantly enhance sensing capabilities, offering improved sensitivity and more precise localisation. Positioned within the fibre network, these sensors will enable crucial applications such as smart structural health monitoring and tectonic activity detection.
Objective
The 5+ Bn km of currently installed data communications optical fibre cable provides an opportunity to create a globe-spanning network of fibre sensors, without laying any new fibres. These traverse the seas and oceans, where conventional sensors are practically non-extent, and major infrastructures, offering potential for smart structural health monitoring.
ECSTATIC will develop novel interferometry and polarisation-based sensing approaches for vibration and acoustic fibre-optic sensing technologies. New possibilities will be defined for sensitivity, distance range and localization, offering a range of solutions for different use cases, while ensuring the coexistence of the sensing signal with live data traffic.
A new compact photonic chip-based dual-microcomb engine will enable enhanced range, resolution, and bandwidth of distributed acoustic sensing together with fundamental new knowledge on the physics of physical stimuli in relation to state-of-polarisation sensing. Simultaneous interrogation of multiple transmitted comb lines in the microwave domain with multi-wavelength interferometry and novel state-of-polarisation millisecond field programmable gate array-based transceivers will be developed and characterised to improve the sensitivity, spatial resolution, and dynamic range of distributed fiber sensors.
To address the limited data storage and processing capabilities of communication networks new digital signal processing algorithms based on edge devices and artificial intelligence/machine learning will be developed and used to extract information via data-compression techniques. Solutions will aim to minimise algorithm complexity while realising real-time sensing of events and network condition with high classification accuracy.
These technologies and algorithms will be tested in real-world submarine, metropolitan and infrastructure networks to validate their potential for early warning of seismic events, predictive maintenance, and network integrity.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensorsoptical sensors
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationstelecommunications networksoptical networksfiber-optic network
Keywords
Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL4-2024-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
B4 7ET Birmingham
United Kingdom