Fiber-optic intrinsic distributed acoustic emission sensor for large structure health monitoring.

A fiber-optic intrinsic distributed acoustic emission (AE) sensor is proposed. By measuring the time delay of two signals from two Mach-Zehnder interferometers, the location of AE can be deduced, and the corresponding sensor is experimentally verified to be feasible with a 206 m average location error in a 20 km sensing range, which shows that this proposed sensor is applicable for distributed AE sensing for large structure health monitoring, with the unique advantages of low cost, simple configuration, and long sensing range. The limitations of the proposed sensor are also discussed, and the future work is presented.