In 2020, Fondazione Politecnico di Milano started working with CVA Spa – Compagnia Valdostana delle Acque – and Prof. Giovanni Menduni’s research team at Politecnico di Milano on a project to test solutions for monitoring hydraulic infrastructures using Brillouin distributed fibre optic sensors (D-FOS). The site chosen for the tests is the penstock bridge above the Dora di Rhêmes river gorge in the locality of Introd, a village in the northern Italian region of Aosta.

Over 800 metres of optic fibre cabling were installed at the points under most strain, these being reinforced concrete membranes constructed in the early 1920s. In parallel with the optic fibre system, the team also installed a wireless sensor network consisting of vibrating wire extensometers, accelerometers and temperature probes. The results from the first year’s monitoring have been published in the MDPI journal Water (https://doi.org/10.3390/w14020188)