Novel non-fiber optical metamaterial waveguide for monitoring canal and pipeline structures

Abstract

The electromagnetic metamaterials are the recent entrants, into the classification of smart materials for structural health monitoring (SHM). Their applications in SHM have raised the curiosity due to their rapid executable speeds in wide-frequency domains. The speed of obtaining health output signals for engineering structures is about 1/100th of the time taken by existing smart material-based frequency domain techniques such as piezoelectric material-based techniques. Recently, we developed an ultra-sensitive near-field sensing technique using metamaterial localized surface plasmon (LSP) ‘sensor’ which produced diagnosable ‘confined surface electromagnetic waves’ for SHM. This paper presents the same near-field sensing technique in the frequency domain but using metamaterial ‘waveguides’ based on propagating surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs)/surface waves. For the experiments, a novel robust metamaterial waveguide coupling zone was designed and applied for monitoring longitudinal and lateral displacements in civil engineering prototype structures such as channels and pipelines. In the context of SHM, coupling zone and metamaterial waveguide resemble fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor and optical fiber waveguide, respectively. Thus, if properly realized, these metamaterials can co-exist with the existing FBG/optical fiber techniques for applications in civil engineering.