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jan08-offprint-ravet.pdf

Disaster prevention in civil infrastructures requires the use of techniques that allow temperature and strain measurements in real time over lengths of a few meters to tens of kilometres. The distributed Brillouin sensor (DBS) technique has the advantage to combine all these characteristics. The sensing mechanism of the DBS involves the interaction of two counter-propagating lightwaves, the Stokes and the pump, in an optical fibre. In this article, we introduce the DBS physics and illustrate how it can be used in civil and structural engineering.