Local structural health monitoring system in aircraft based on fiber Bragg grating array

Abstract

In this study, a structural health monitoring system for aircraft wings based on a fiber-optic grating sensing network was designed, and a three-dimensional position correction algorithm based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) array test data was developed. Solving the deformation parameters using mathematical models of strain-position offset introduces errors, leading to inaccurate measurements and affecting the preciseness of three-dimensional-reconstructed surfaces. Two fitting algorithms (bitone and spline with linear interpolations) are proposed to improve this method in analyzing errors at the measured points of the wing structure. The relative error of each measurement point of the reconstructed wing structure using the bitone and spline interpolation methods was lower than 4.96%. Furthermore, the absolute error was within 0.014 mm, the average relative error was lower than 3.47%, and the root-mean-square error was lower than 0.01 mm. Compared to linear interpolation, the average relative error decreased by up to 5.84%. The experimental results show that the measurement accuracy of bitone and spline interpolation was significantly higher than that of linear interpolation. FBG array measurements using bitone and spline interpolations for the local structural health monitoring system of aircraft improve the fitting reconstruction effect for the wing structure and stabilize the compensation effect.

Keywords

• Fiber grating
• Structural deformation
• Three-dimensional reconstruction
• Structural monitoring
• Biharmonic spline fitting
• Linear interpolation