News, Road Technology

10 Million kroner for verification funding

The Norwegian Research Council has granted 10 million Norwegian Kroner to fund the verification of fibre optic based tunnel monitoring technology being developed at CMR. CMR is carrying out the main research components of this project. The project is lead...

CMR’s technology can detect vibrations induced by traffic occurring over several kilometres of fibre installed along a tunnel.

Advanced Big Data analysis

The technology works by measuring thousands of laser pulses that are been sent into an optical fibre and reflected back. The reflected laser pulses contain information about the vibration pattern along the fibre. This results in large amounts of data, even in just a short time span. CMR has developed advanced data analysis algorithms that enables break down of the reflected laser pulses into different vibration frequencies. From this information about the traffic, down to individual vehicles can be extracted.

The technology can report where vibrations occur along the fibre to a high degree of accuracy, and so can be used to pinpoint the exact locations of individual vehicles as traffic passes through the tunnel.

Other applications

Besides traffic flow monitoring, potential applications of this technology include geophysical measurements such as seismic monitoring, continuous monitoring of pipelines and perimeter security monitoring. A comprehensive research of other applicable markets forms part of the verification project.

CMR are also participating in projects with the aim of reducing global warming where Carbon Dioxide is injected into geological formations for storage. Current projects include adapting the technology to serve as an early warning system for CO2 injection and  storage in geological formations.