Towards the simultaneous monitoring of load and damage in aircraft structures using fiber Bragg grating sensors

Load monitoring and damage detection are the two critical aspects of aircraft structural health monitoring (SHM). The load monitoring is achieved by detecting the local strain changes while the damage detection is generally accomplished by the monitoring of acoustic signal changes. It would be ideal that a single sensor can perform both tasks simultaneously. This paper reports the demonstration of using fiber Bragg gratings to monitor load and acoustic signal applied on a simulated aircraft structure. The results clearly show that a single fiber Bragg grating sensor with short grating length has the potential to perform both tasks simultaneously.