Damage Monitoring in Composite Structures by Embedded Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors

Abstract

We present a novel methodology for modeling and detecting the anomaly evolution in composite structures by fiber Bragg grating sensor (FBG). The strain/ transverse force and temperature change effects on the embedded FBG sensor area are separately modeled by introducing the change of the refractive indices and grating period along the fiber to the transfer matrix formulation method (‘measured’ spectrum). Furthermore, the use of genetic algorithm for reconstruction of non-uniform applied anomaly from the ‘measured’ spectrum is presented. The presented method is verified through the numerical simulations and the results show that our methodology can effectively represent and model the profile of the applied perturbation profile.