Stretchable Printed Device for the Simultaneous Sensing of Temperature and Strain Validated in a Mouse Wound Healing Model

Temperature and strain are two vital parameters that play a significant role in wound diagnosis and healing. As periodic temperature measurements with a custom thermometer or strain measurements with conventional metallic gauges became less feasible for the modern competent health monitoring, individual temperature and strain measurement modalities incorporated into wearables and patches were developed. The proposed research in the article shows the development of a single sensor solution which can simultaneously measure both the above mentioned parameters. This work integrates a thermoelectric principle based temperature measurement approach into wearables, ensuring flexibility and bendability properties without affecting its thermo-generated voltage. The modified thermoelectric material helped to achieve stretchability of the sensor, thanks to its superior mechano-transduction properties. Moreover, the stretch-induced resistance changes become an additional marker for strain measurements so that both the parameters can be measured with the same sensor. Due to the independent measurement parameters (open circuit voltage and sensor resistance ), the sensing model is greatly attractive for measurements without cross-sensitivity. The highly resilient temperature and strain sensor show excellent linearity, repeatability and good sensitivity. Besides, due to the compatibility of the fabrication scheme to low temperature processing of the flexible materials and to mass volume production, printed fabrication methodologies were adopted to realize the sensor. This promises low cost production and a disposable nature (single use) of the sensor patch. The temperature-strain dual parameter semi-transparent sensor has been further tested on mice wounds in vivo. The preliminary experiments on mice wounds offer prospects for developing smart, i.e. sensorized, wound dressings for clinical applications.

Environmental Durability of an Optical Fiber Cable Intended for Distributed Strain Measurements in Concrete Structures

The present study investigates the environmental durability of a distributed optical fiber sensing (DOFS) cable on the market, commonly used for distributed strain measurements in reinforced concrete structures. An extensive experimental program was conducted on different types of specimens (including samples of bare DOFS cable and plain concrete specimens instrumented with this DOFS cable) that were exposed to accelerated and natural ageing (NA) conditions for different periods of up to 18 months. The instrumentation of both concrete specimens consisted of DOFS cables embedded at the center of the specimens and bonded at the concrete surface, as these two configurations are commonly deployed in the field. In these configurations, the alkalinity of the surrounding cement medium and the outdoor conditions are the main factors potentially affecting the characteristics of the DOFS component materials and the integrity of the various interfaces, and hence impacting the strain transfer process between the host structure and the core optical fiber (OF). Therefore, immersion in an alkaline solution at an elevated temperature or freeze/thaw (F/T) and immersion/drying (I/D) cycles were chosen as accelerated ageing conditions, depending on the considered configuration. Mechanical characterizations by tensile and pull-out tests were then carried out on the exposed specimens to assess the evolution of the mechanical properties of individual component materials as well as the evolution of bond properties at various interfaces (internal interfaces of the DOFS cable, and interface between the cable and the host structure) during ageing. Complementary physico-chemical characterizations were also performed to better understand the underlying degradation processes. The experimental results highlight that immersion in the alkaline solution induced a significant and rapid decrease in the bond properties at internal interfaces of the DOFS cable and at the cable/concrete interface (in the case of the embedded cable configuration), which was assigned to chemical degradation at the surface of the cable coating in contact with the solution (hydrolysis and thermal degradation of the EVA copolymer component). Meanwhile, F/T and I/D cycles showed more limited effects on the mechanical properties of the component materials and interfaces in the case of the bonded cable configuration. A comparison with the same specimens exposed to outdoor NA suggested that the chosen accelerated ageing conditions may not be totally representative of actual service conditions, but provided indications for improving the ageing protocols in future research. In the last part, an analysis of the distributed strain profiles collected during pull-out tests on instrumented concrete specimens clearly illustrated the consequences of ageing processes on the strain response of the DOFS cable.

Multilevel RTN Removal Tools for Dynamic FBG Strain Measurements Corrupted by Peak-Splitting Artefacts

Strain measurements using fibre Bragg grating (FBG) optical sensors are becoming ever more commonplace. However, in some cases, these measurements can become corrupted by sudden jumps in the signal, which manifest as spikes or step-like offsets in the data. These jumps are caused by a defect in the FBG itself, which is referred to as peak-splitting. The effects of peak splitting artefacts on FBG strain measurements show similarities with an additive multi-level telegraph noise process, in which the amplitudes and occurrences of the jumps are related to fibre deformation states. Whenever it is not possible to re-assess the raw spectral data with advanced peak tracking software, other means for removing the jumps from the data have to be found. The two methods presented in this article are aimed at removing additive multi-level random telegraph noise (RTN) from the raw data. Both methods are based on denoising the sample wise difference signal using a combination of an outlier detection scheme followed by an outlier replacement step. Once the difference signal has been denoised, the cumulative sum is used to arrive back at a strain time series. Two methods will be demonstrated for reconstructing severely corrupted strain time series; the data for this verification has been collected from sub-soil strain measurements obtained from an operational offshore wind-turbine. The results show that the proposed methods can be used effectively to reconstruct the dynamic content of the corrupted strain time series. It has been illustrated that errors in the outlier replacements accumulate and can cause a quasi-static drift. A representative mean value and drift correction are proposed in terms of an optimization problem, which maximizes the overlap between the reconstruction and a subset of the raw data; whereas a high-pass filter is suggested to remove the quasi static drift if only the dynamic band of the signal is of interest.

Realtime Wellbore Digitalization for Stimulations Using Multi-Well Fiber Optics

Distributed Fiber-optic Sensing (DFOS) provides real-time data acquisition, monitoring and diagnostics for well stimulation and well spacing assessment. These include measurements of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) with high frequency acoustics in treatment wells, and low frequency strain/temperature sensing in offset monitor ones. The goal of this integrated study is to show the value of multi-well fiber sensing for real time fracturing diagnostics and stimulation optimization. By integrating near field injection to far field strain responses we assess overall reservoir development. The availability of fibers on both the treatment well and a nearby observation well allows us to investigate the near-wellbore injection profile and the far-field strain fracture propagation. Quantitative strain levels clearly respond to the effects of well distance, location and treatment well stimulation design. Monitoring well strain measurements of fracture density and triggered stimulated span were logged and compared to acoustic signals in the nearfield stage by stage. DAS interpretation was conducted during the treatment of each stage indicating the effectiveness and efficiency of the completion design. Results show that this is a very effective tool to better understand the performance of the fracturing treatment by digital transformation using DAS data. In addition, acoustic and strain measurements also validated its diagnostic capability for real-time operation monitoring. In this presentation we show how the near-field acoustic and far-field strain measurements allow for better understanding of the completion efficiency. This is by assessing the far field response to quantified DAS injected signals in the treatment. This analysis takes advantage of fiber installation on both the treatment and nearby monitor well. The fluid and proppant allocations in the near field were performed on the treatment well using relative acoustic intensities. Meanwhile, the fracture propagation induced strain change is recorded by the offset fiber well. Using this fiber data reveals dominant clusters and stage bias from near-field injection profile. Simultaneously the far-field identified fracture counts from strain further enable a geomechanical assessment of the stimulated reservoir and assess the effectiveness of the completion design. Multiple DAS fiber equipped wells not only provide single diagnostic tool for each of the fiber well, but also demonstrate significant integrated assessment of the stimulation effectiveness, completion efficiency, well interaction, and reservoir description. Availability of near and far field measurements constitutes an important tool to assess properties of the reservoir. Here we show how different vantage points can help illuminate a fracturing program in unconventional reservoirs.