Concrete curing monitoring using polymer optical fibre Bragg grating sensors

A novel prototype sensing device based on polymer (CYTOP-XYLEX) optical fibre Bragg grating sensors was developed to monitor temperature and relative humidity levels of reinforced concrete from its initial curing phase to a prolonged period. The prototype can be used for concrete quality control offering numerous advantages, such as small size, robustness, high sensitivity, and low-cost continuous in-situ measurements.The research leading to these results has received funding from the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - Individual Fellowships) under REA grant agreement No. 844618 (project POSPORI). This work is also funded by the research project INTEGRATED/0918/0031 (LightSense Project) by the Republic of Cyprus through the Research and Innovation Foundation and European Development Fund and the Cyprus University of Technology. This paper also reports research developed under financial support provided by "FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia", Portugal, co-funded by the European Social Fund, namely through the post-doc fellowship of José Melo, with reference SFRH/BPD/115352/2016 and by Base Funding - UIDB/04708/2020 and Programmatic Funding - UIDP/04708/2020 of the CONSTRUCT - Instituto de I&D em Estruturas e Construções - funded by national funds through the FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) relatively to the authors José Melo and Humberto Varum. This work was also supported by FCT/MCTES and FCT/MEC through national funds and when applicable co-funded EU funds under the projects UIDB/50025/2020-UIDP/50025/2020 and grants CEECINST/00026/2018 and 2021.00667.CEECIND