The adhesive effect on ultrasonic Lamb wave detection sensitivity of remotely bonded fiber Bragg grating sensors

Abstract

Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors are excellent transducers for ultrasonic signal detection in structural health monitoring (SHM) application. While the FBG sensors are typically bonded directly on the surface of a structure to collect signals, one of the major challenges arises from demodulating relevant information from the low amplitude signal. The authors have experimentally demonstrated that the ultrasonic wave detection sensitivity of FBG sensors can be increased by bonding optical fiber away from the FBG location. This configuration is referred to here as remote bonding. However the mechanism causing this phenomenon has not been explored. In this work, we simulate the previous experimental work through a transient analysis based on the finite element method, and the output FBG response is calculated through the transfer matrix method. We first model an optical fiber bonded on the surface of an aluminum plate with an adhesive. The consistent input signal is excited to the plate, which is detected by the directly and remotely-bonded FBGs. The effect of the presence of the adhesive around the FBG is investigated by analyzing strain and displacement along the length of the FBGs at the locations of direct and remote bonding cases, and the consequent output FBG responses. The result demonstrates that the sensitivity difference between the direct and remote bonding cases is originated from shear lag effect due to adhesive.