A polymer-coated fiber Bragg grating (PCFBG) is examined for real-time temperature and strain monitoring in composite materials at cryogenic temperatures. The proposed sensor enables the simultaneous measurement of temperature and strain at extremely low temperatures by tracking the changes in the reflected center wavelengths from a pair of PCFBGs embedded in a composite material. The cryogenic temperature sensing was realized by introducing polymer coatings onto bare FBGs, which resulted in high temperature sensitivity under cryogenic conditions. A comparison of wavelength responses of the Bragg grating with and without a polymer coating toward temperatures ranging from 25°C to $-180°\mathrm{C}$ was performed. The polymer-coated FBG exhibited a sensitivity of 48 pm/°C, which is 10 times greater than that of the bare FBGs. In addition, the encapsulation of the FBG in a capillary tube made it possible to evaluate the strain accumulated within the composite during operation under cryogenic conditions.

A simple and highly sensitive phase-demodulation technique is proposed, and its use for a fiber Bragg grating strain sensor is experimentally demonstrated. Sampling a phase-modulated Mach–Zehnder output with controlled time delay produced two quadrature data streams that have relative quadrature phase difference (90°). The Bragg wavelength-dependent phase information is extracted by application of digital arctangent function and phase unwrapping to the quadrature signals. By use of this technique with a reference grating, strain sensing at as much as a 30-kHz sampling rate was obtained with strain resolution of 3.5 microstrains and 6 nanostrains/ $\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$in quasi-static and dynamic strain measurements, respectively.

An interferometric strain-sensing system that combines an unbalanced Mach–Zehnder wavelength discriminator and spliced different-diameter fiber Bragg gratings is presented that has the capability to distinguish strain from temperature effects. Because the gratings are written in 135- and 165-$\mathit{\mu }\mathrm{m}$-diameter fibers drawn from the same preform, when they are spliced they show similar temperature sensitivities but different responses to applied strain. Thus the relative Bragg wavelength difference of the two gratings is affected only by strain, and one can measure it accurately by monitoring the amplitude variation of the interference signal rather than the conventional phase variation.

A fiber-optic cure monitoring system is proposed to measure curing status of composite structure such as a large scale wind turbine blade. The monitoring is based on the measurement of Fresnel reflectivity at the optical fiber/epoxy resin interface. The refractive index of epoxy resin varies throughout curing stages, changing the Fresnel reflectivity. The curing status is decided by monitoring the reflected intensity variation. The usage of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor helps to separate the temperature-induced cross effects. A Gaussian curve fitting algorithm was applied to FBG spectra which were distorted in curing procedure. The substantial measurement errors could be minimized by locating the centroids of the Gaussian curve-fitted spectra. From the experiments performed in various isothermal conditions, the proposed system successfully identified the onset of gelation and the completion of curing of epoxy resins.

To improve measurement accuracy of spectrally distorted fiber Bragg grating temperature sensors, reflection profiles were curve fitted to Gaussian shapes, of which center positions were transformed into temperature information. By applying the Gaussian curve-fitting algorithm in a tunable bandpass filter demodulation scheme, $\sim 0.3°\text{C}$ temperature resolution was obtained with a severely distorted grating sensor, which was much better than that obtained using the highest peak search algorithm. A binary search was also used to retrieve the optimal fitting curves with the least amount of processing time.