Test of a fiber Bragg grating sensor network for commercial aircraft structures

The field test reported on in this paper has shown the great potential of fiber-optic Bragg gating sensors. They are suitable for load monitoring of aviation structures under real-world conditions. The results obtained with the Bragg gratings show excellent consistency with the strain gage results. This indicates that both the sensor installation technique of gluing the sensors to the surface and the sensor interrogation technique using a tunable laser-based system, both of which were studied in the field test, are well-suited for these measurements. In addition, the fiber-optic sensor network has several advantages: it is immune to electromagnetic interference and has high multiplexing capability, for hundreds of these sensors can be aligned along a single optical fiber, if desired. This significantly reduces the effort needed for wiring and also leads to a considerable decrease in weight compared to standard electrical sensor networks.