Aircraft operators are faced with increasing requirements to extend the service life of air platforms beyond their designed life cycles, resulting in heavy maintenance and inspection burdens as well as economic pressure. Structural health monitoring (SHM) based on advanced sensor technology is potentially a cost-effective approach to meet operational requirements, and to reduce maintenance costs. Fiber optic sensor technology is being developed to provide existing and future aircrafts with SHM capability due to its unique superior characteristics. This review paper covers the aerospace SHM requirements and an overview of the fiber optic sensor technologies. In particular, fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor technology is evaluated as the most promising tool for load monitoring and damage detection, the two critical SHM aspects of air platforms. At last, recommendations on the implementation and integration of FBG sensors into an SHM system are provided.

A wavelength interrogator based on monolithically integrated echelle diffractive grating and detector arrays was proposed for potential air platforms structural health monitoring. This paper discussed its operation principle and presented some initial experimental results.

Within several countries, the military is undergoing significant economic pressure to extend the use of its air fleet beyond its established design life. The availability of low weight, small size, reliable and cost-effective technologies to detect and monitor incipient damage and to alert prior to catastrophic failures is critical to sustain operational effectiveness. To enable the implementation of distributed and highly multiplexed optical fiber sensors networks to aerospace platforms, the data acquisition (interrogation) system has to meet small size and low weight requirements. This paper reports on our current development of micro-sized Echelle Diffractive Gratings (EDG) based interrogation system for strain monitoring of serially multiplexed fibre Bragg grating sensors. The operation principle of the interrogator and its suitability for strain measurements is demonstrated. Static load measurements obtained using this system are compared to those acquired using a optical multi-wavelength meter and are found to have strong correlation.