Soil slope monitoring by use of a Brillouin distributed sensor

We report the experimental application of Brillouin Optical Time Domain Analysis (BOTDA) to the monitoring of deformation of a small-scale slope reconstituted in a 1.5 m-long instrumented flume and subjected to artificial rainfall until failure. The tests confirm that the BOTDA technique is capable to detect soil movement during the pre-failure stage. In addition, the high spatial resolution of our setup allowed us to discriminate between the various locations of the slope model, giving us insight into the dynamics of soil subjected to artificial rain.