Health monitoring of Nippon challenge's yacht structures entered America's cup 2000 using a fiber optic distributed sensor

摘要

We constructed a damage detection system using a fiber optic distributed sensor, namely a Brillouin optical time domain reflectometer (BOTDR). And we applied it to International America's Cup Class (IACC) yachts, the Japanese entries in America's Cup 2000. IACC yachts are designed to be lightweight and have longitudinal stiffness to make the fastest yachts possible. So advanced composite sandwich materials are used but there have been accidents such as hull breakage in the past. These incidents mean that it is important to detect highly stressed or damaged regions that might cause a catastrophic fracture. We measured the static strain distributions of the yachts periodically on shore. There was no critical change in the structural integrity of IACC yachts during race.