Civil structural health monitoring has become significantly more important within the last
decades due to rapidly growing demand on new constructions world-wide with respect to limited
space and increased sustainability as well as longer service lifetimes of existing structures.
Knowledge about the structural performance and health condition is essential to plan and design
condition-based maintenance works. State-of-the-art monitoring techniques including
displacement readings at the surface internal deformation sensors as well as manual or
image-based visual inspections often have limitations either in the spatial or the temporal
resolution.This thesis introduces enhanced monitoring concepts for structural and geotechnical
applications based on distributed fiber optic sensing. The distributed strain sensing feature
is combined with geodetic techniques and one-dimensional displacement sensors to analyze
fully-distributed curvature and bending profiles along civil structures where the optical
fibers are directly embedded inside or attached along the structure. Various applications are
presented in which individually developed approaches have been integrated into real-scale
structures using different DFOS sensors and installation techniques. These include linear
objects with different material composition like grouted steel anchors or concrete beams and
curved structures such as tunnel linings. The suitability of different designs is validated
within laboratory experiments where the results are proven using pointwise displacement
transducers geodetic measurements and image-based sensing techniques.
