Application of Point and Distributed Optical Fiber Sensors to Health Monitoring of Smart Structures

Point optical fiber sensors are useful in the monitoring of localized structural damage, but a large number of the sensors must be multiplexed for large structure monitoring. On the other hand, distributed optical fiber sensors can obtain a continuous distribution of strain or temperature with one sensing fiber, and they are suitable for the large structure monitoring due to their measurement range reaching tens of kilometers. However, the distributed sensors have the spatial resolution of tens of centimeters to several meters, and they measure averaged strain or temperature. In this paper, the application results of transmission-type extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric (TEFPI) optical fiber sensors and Brillouin distributed optical fiber sensors to structural monitoring are presented. The TEFPI optical fiber sensors and Brillouin distributed sensors were applied to the fatigue damage monitoring of an aluminum plate patched with CFRP composite and the deflection monitoring of an alumimum-bending beam, respectively.