Steel wires in the splay saddle of suspension bridges are highly susceptible to corrosion due to a highly exposed environment, moisture, and corrosive media retention, and limitations of protective measures. Existing optical fiber strain monitoring (using conventional spiral-wrapping) fails to quantify corrosion on small-diameter wires. This study optimizes a corrosion-resistant fiber deployment scheme. Accelerated corrosion tests with customized wire tensioning device reveal that wire corrosion creates cross-sectional discontinuities, forming high-stress zones with a diagnostic bimodal strain distribution for precise corrosion localization. Corrosion zone strain evolution shows three stages—uniform, non-uniform, and critical fracture—quantified by strain heterogeneity. Key influences include initial strain, corrosion length/rate, and load variations. A quantitative theoretical model linking fiber strain response to corrosion degree was established, incorporating a correction factor K to reduce maximum average relative error to <3%. This enables distributed optical fiber sensing to accurately assess steel wire corrosion severity.
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