Abstract
In-service structural health monitoring of composite aircraft structures plays a key role in the assessment of their performance and integrity. In recent years, Fibre Optic Sensors (FOS) have proved to be a potentially excellent technique for real-time in-situ monitoring of these structures due to their numerous advantages, such as immunity to electromagnetic interference, small size, light weight, durability, and high bandwidth, which allows a great number of sensors to operate in the same system, and the possibility to be integrated within the material. However, more effort is still needed to bring the technology to a fully mature readiness level. In this paper, recent research and applications in structural health monitoring of composite aircraft structures using FOS have been critically reviewed, considering both the multi-point and distributed sensing techniques.
Highlights
Today, high percentages of advanced composite materials are integrated into the primary flight structures of aircraft
In order to estimate more precisely the location of possible defects such as impact damage, delamination etc. using dynamic strain measurements obtained with a network of fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs) sensors, research has focused on the use of advanced pattern recognition techniques, based on independent component analysis (ICA)
The performance characteristics and intrinsic limitations of currently available fibre optic sensors and systems have been discussed with reference to the basic principles and the specific technologies of sensors and their sensor deployment in composite structures and possible application cases
Summary
High percentages of advanced composite materials are integrated into the primary flight structures of aircraft. As concerns damage detection, ultrasonic or acoustic piezoelectric sensors, considered as excellent candidates, are often likely to be in the development stage, to have a low multiplexing capability, lower durability and inferior strain-to-failure resistance For all these reasons, currently the scientific, industrial and end-user communities generally view fibre optic sensors to be the technology with the highest potential for continuous real-time monitoring of aircraft structures. Significant advances in the field of fibre optical sensors systems have produced innovative and powerful solutions, such as hybrid methods based on the simultaneous use of FBG and piezoelectric sensors [12] or hierarchical methods where the sensing architecture resembles the human nervous system [13] These innovations may extend the potential of FOS-based SHM systems to the most challenging situations, such as damage detection in large composite structures. The paper will present an extensive overview of the applications and related FOS-based SHM techniques that have been developed over the last decade for composite aircraft structures monitoring
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