Composite scarf repair monitoring using fibre Bragg grating sensors

摘要

Structural health monitoring (SHM) technology may be applied to composite bonded repairs to enable the continuous through-life assessment of the repair efficacy. This paper describes an SHM technique for the detection of debonding in composite scarf repairs using fibre optic Bragg grating strain sensors. A typical composite sandwich structure with a scarf repair on one surface is examined in this paper. A finite element study was conducted which showed that the strain in the debonded region changed significantly compared to the undamaged state. A differential strain approach was used to facilitate the detection of debonds, where two sensors were strategically positioned so that their strain differential increased as the damage propagated. With the use of matching gratings, this technique greatly reduced the support equipment requirement by converting the spectral information into an intensity-modulated signal, thus allowing a compact photodetector to be used for sensor interrogation. An experimental investigation was conducted to validate the theoretically predicted results. The experimental measurements agreed well with the numerical findings qualitatively, indicating that the proposed scheme has great potential as a simple and effective monitoring technique for composite scarf repairs.