Optical fibre sensors for health monitoring of bonded repair systems

In the aircraft industry the use of externally bonded composite repairs has become an accepted way of repairing fatigue, or corrosion, damaged metallic structural components. However, current NDI and damage assessment techniques for composite repairs are passive and generally performed on ground. The challenge is to develop new techniques utilising recent analytical and experimental tools. This report examines the use of optical fibre sensors. Optical fibres offer a means of monitoring the load transfer process in these repairs, and can therefore be used to provide an indication of the integrity of the repair. This paper describes the use of an array of fibre Bragg grating strain sensors (FBGs) for the in situ monitoring of bonded repairs to aircraft structures and, in particular, the monitoring of crack propagation beneath a repair. In this work the FBGs have been multiplexed using a combination of wavelength and spatial techniques employing a tunable Fabry–Pérot (FP) filter to track individual gratings. The multiplexed FBGs were then surface-mounted on a boron–epoxy unidirectional composite patch bonded to an aluminium component. The sensors were located so as to monitor the changing stress field associated with the propagation of a crack beneath the patch. The ability of relating experimental results to sensor readings is then confirmed using both a thermo-elastic scan of the patch and 3D finite element analysis.