Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE)

The location and severity of infrastructural defects and damage is usually poorly understood. New technologies are needed to facilitate identification, characterization, and time-lapse monitoring of defects/damage/deterioration in a significantly more efficient and spatio-temporally comprehensive fashion than techniques currently used. Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is one potential sensing technology that could achieve these various goals and a variety of other technical challenges faced by Reclamation. This scoping-level research project consisted of a literature and technology review to assess the current state of the art in DAS and related sensing technologies and their capabilities and applications for structural health assessment and time-lapse monitoring of large civil structures. Results of this scoping-level research project indicate that DAS holds significant promise in the ability to help address many of Reclamation’s technical challenges related to the assessment and maintenance and security of its aging infrastructure.