Development of a Contactless Measurement Method Using an LED-Optical Displacement Sensor for Vibration Stress of Piping Systems

The present paper proposes an efficient contactless measurement method for vibration stress of piping systems, by which the measurement tasks are performed within an extremely short time and the measured stress can be evaluated immediately after the measurement. The proposed method includes two processes, in which the bending shape of a pipe induced by vibration response is identified by a transmission type optical displacement sensor and the vibration stress is calculated based on beam theory using the curvature radius estimated by approximating the bending shape. The proposed method uses only one LED-optical sensor to measure the vibration stress though multiple sensors must be used in the previous method developed by the authors. Therefore, the measuring system could be reduced in size and a light-weight and portable measurement instrument was developed. The measurement accuracy and reliability of the new method were verified by the vibration experiment using a mock-up piping system.