Temperature-compensated fiber-optic online monitoring methodology for 3D shape and strain of near-space airship envelope

Near-space airships are high-end airships that are being vigorously developed in the aerospace industry. It has important application value in the telecommunication, surveillance, monitoring, remote sensing, and exploration fields. The envelope is the key component that provides lift to the airship. Online monitoring of envelope status is critical to ensuring airship performance, safety, and reliability. However, online monitoring of the 3D shape and strain of the airship envelope is still a challenging task. A hybrid multi-core and single-core fiber-optic monitoring method with a temperature self-compensation function is proposed to address this issue. The method uses multi-core fiber optic sensors, 3D curves, and a surface reconstruction algorithm to obtain the 3D shape of the envelope. Temperature decoupling of the sensing signal is carried out via sensors on the central core of the multi-core fibers that are only sensitive to temperature, thereby eliminating the influence of temperature changes on the measurement accuracy. The strain field of the envelope skin is measured by single-core fiber optic sensors and a strain interpolation algorithm. The accuracy of the proposed method is experimentally validated. The results show that the 3D shape measurement error of the envelope skin is 4.82% when the skin is bent in the range of 10 m − 1 − 15.38 m − 1 . When the ambient temperature changes in the range of − 50 ∘ C − 150 ∘ C , the position measurement error caused by the temperature change is only 1.2% of the effective measurement length (160 mm) of the multi-core fiber optic sensor. When the skin is stretched in the range of 500 − 5000 µ ε , the measurement error of the average value of the skin strain field is only 0.75%. This proves that the proposed method can simultaneously measure the 3D shape and strain field of the envelope skin and also effectively suppress the influence of ambient temperature changes on the measurement accuracy. The proposed method has application prospects in the online monitoring of airship envelopes.