Breakthrough Marine Strain-Sensing Optical Cable Validated
A research paper published in Measurement, a leading scientific journal, detailed the development and experimental validation of a quasi-distributed marine strain-sensing optical cable based on Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) composites. The study, published in July 2026, addresses the technical bottleneck in existing marine cable monitoring technologies that struggle to achieve real-time and precise measurement of holistic cable strain.
The innovative design encapsulates Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) arrays within GFRP, creating a tight-buffered sensing unit that is stranded with armored steel wires to ensure stable strain transfer. Compared to traditional submarine optical cables, this novel design ensures precise strain detection while significantly reducing dry and wet weights by 20.08% and 31.45% respectively, with a tensile strength reduction of only 28.69%.
Full-scale tensile tests and combined tensile-bending load tests demonstrated that the new sensing cable achieves a 97.9% overall strain transfer efficiency between the armored steel wires and the strain-sensing optical units, with excellent linearity and consistency (R² = 0.997). This breakthrough provides a reliable solution for quasi-distributed health monitoring of marine engineering structures, overcoming the limitations of conventional point-based monitoring
