Jaewon Saw presented as an invited speaker at the International Meeting for Applied Geoscience & Energy (IMAGE) Conference on August 26, 2025 in Houston, Texas, where she shared research on “Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Urban Monitoring: Roadways and Pipelines”. Each year, this conference brings together geoscientists, engineers, and industry leaders to discuss new research and applications.
This work (in collaboration with Maksymilian Jasiak, Shih-Hung Chiu, and Kenichi Soga) shared results from several ongoing studies, including results from the smart road at CSI (where fiber optic cables are directly embedded into the road material), two water distribution pipelines buried under residential roadways, as well as a full-scale laboratory water pipeline test. Each study provided insights into fiber sensitivity, signal characteristics, and detectability of road user (vehicles and pedestrians) activities and water pipeline events (pipe flow, leakage, pressure transients).
This work demonstrated a few key takeaways:
- Embedded fibers provide clearer and sharper signals, and can enable dual-use monitoring of both roads and pipelines.
- Fiber coupling and placement are critical drivers of sensitivity.
- Telecom fibers offer scalability but with variable performance. Embedded fibers serve as a benchmark for strong coupling and help contextualize the noisier, less controlled signals from telecom fibers.
- Ongoing work is focused on testing fibers under varied conditions to guide future deployments and trade-offs.
Work at CSI continues to build on this work to investigate and assess how DAS can be more widely leveraged for urban infrastructure monitoring.
