Compared to metals, composite materials offer higher stiffness, more resilience to corrosion, have lighter weights, and their mechanical properties can be tailored by their layup configuration. Despite these features, composite materials are susceptible to a diversity of damages, including matrix cracks, delamination, and fibre breakage. If these damages are not detected and mended, they can spread and result in the failure of the whole structure. In particular, when the structure is under fatigue and vibrations during flight, this process can expedite. Moreover, if such damages occur in the internal layers of the composite material, they will be difficult to detect and to characterise. There is thus a huge demand for reliable and accurate structural health monitoring methods to identify these defects. Such methods either try to monitor the structural integrity of the composite during service, or they are used for studying a desired configuration of a composite material during fatigue and tensile tests. This thesis provides structural health monitoring solutions that can potentially be used for both these categories. The structural health monitoring applications developed in this thesis range from accurate strain and displacement measurement, to detection of cracks and the identification of damages in composites. In this thesis, fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensors were chosen for this purpose. The miniature size and small diameter of these sensors makes them an ideal candidate for embedding them between composite layers, without severely altering the mechanical properties of the host composite material. They can thus provide us with direct information about the current state of the laminated composite, potentially at any depth. This is especially useful for acquiring information about the internal layers of the composite material, as barely visible impact damages and micro-cracks often form beneath the surface of the material without being visible on its exterior. In spite of their interesting physical characteristics, applications of FBG sensors are typically limited to point strain or temperature sensors. Further, it is often assumed that the strain field along the sensor length is uniform. For this reason, there is currently a gap in the field of structural health monitoring in retrieving meaningful information about the non-uniform strain field to which the FBG sensor is subjected in damaged structures. The focus of this thesis is on analysing the response of FBG sensors to highly non-uniform strain fields, which are a characteristic of the existence of damage in composites. To tackle this problem, first a new model for the analysis of FBG responses to nonuniform strain fields will be presented. Using this model, two algorithms are presented to accurately estimate the average of such non-uniform axial strain fields, which conventional strain estimation algorithms fail to deliver. In fact, it is shown that the state-of-the-art strain estimation methods using FBG sensors can lead to errors of up to a few thousand microstrains, and the presented algorithms in this thesis can compensate for such errors. It was also shown that these methods are robust against spectral noise from the interrogation system, which can pave the way for more affordable FBG based strain estimation solutions. Another contribution of this thesis is the demonstration of two new algorithms for thedetection of matrix cracks, and for accurate monitoring of the delamination growth in composites, using conventional FBG sensors. These algorithms are in particular useful for studying the mechanical behaviour of laminated composites in laboratory setups. For instance, the matrix crack detection algorithm is capable of characterising internal transverse cracks along the FBG length during tensile tests. Along the same lines, the delamination growth monitoring algorithm can accurately localise the delamination crack tip along the FBG length in mode-I tensile and fatigue tests. These algorithms can perform in real-time, which makes them ideal for dynamic measurement of crack propagation under fatigue, and their spatial resolution and accuracy is superior to the other state-of-the-art damage detection techniques. Finally, to enhance the precision of the damage detection schemes presented in this thesis, two different methods are proposed to accurately determine the active gauge length of the FBG sensor, and its position along the optical fibre. This information is generally not provided for commercial FBG sensors with such accuracy, which can adversely affect the precision of crack tip localisation algorithms. Following the algorithms provided in this thesis, the sensor position can be marked on the optical fibre with micrometer accuracy. ... Read more

In this letter, we propose a method for estimating the length of single-mode fiber Bragg grating type sensors with high accuracy. Our method is based on calculating the maximum oscillation frequency of the side-lobes of the FBG reflection spectrum. We show that this frequency is independent of the stress field to which the sensor is subjected, and is dependent on the length of the sensor. This method can be used to characterize the gauge length of already installed FBG sensors so that they can provide useful data for engineering models of structural integrity. All the analyses are based on the approximated transfer matrix model, which is a newly developed numerical method for the analysis of the FBG reflection spectrum under various stress fields. ... Read more

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to characterise barely visible transverse matrix cracks in composite structures using fibre Bragg grating (FBG) optical sensors. Matrix cracks are one of the most prevalent types of damage in composite structures, and detecting them in the internal layers of composites has remained a challenge. In this paper, we will show that the formation of cracks in the internal layers of composite structures alters the side-lobes of the reflection spectra of FBG sensors by adding new harmonics to them. We argue that the spread and the location of these harmonics depends on both the mechanical properties of the composite material and the location of the crack along the length of the FBG sensor. Via computer simulations and experimental measurements, we validate our hypotheses, and the results are in agreement with our model. ... Read more

Loads applied transversely on the external surface of waveguides change their circular cross-sectional geometry generating birefringence. Due to this effect the reflected spectrum of a Fibre Bragg grating (FBG) undergoes a splitting of the single peak of the Bragg wavelength. In this work, we employed the Transfer Matrix Method (TMM) for x- and y-polarized wave-modes to model the uniform FBG reflection spectra for uniform and non-uniform transverse loads. We also performed experimental measurements for two different transverse load scenarios. The load profiles chosen for these experiments were applied on the FBG sensor through a block of steel and a roll bearing pin. Then, the modelled and experimental results were compared resulting in good agreement of 85% (on average). Finally, during the roll bearing pin loading test, different responses were observed depending how the FBGs were surface mounted. To investigate this, the glue layer influence on the reflected spectrum was further studied experimentally. ... Read more

Fibre Bragg grating sensors have gained a lot of attention in damage detection and strain measurement applications in the past few decades. These applications include matrix crack detection and delamination tip monitoring in composite structures, crack detection in concrete and civil engineering structures and etc. The damage localisation accuracy of such methods, directly depends on precise knowledge on the position of the FBG sensor. However, this information is not commonly provided by manufacturing companies with such accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to accurately determine the position of an FBG sensor with a low complexity setup. The proposed method offers an accuracy of below 10 μm, and can consequently increase the spatial resolution of damage detection methods. ... Read more

This study focuses on the understanding of the thermal and structural behavior of an innovative Type IV multi-spherical composite-overwrapped pressure vessel through an experimental assessment that consists of hydrostatic testing at ambient conditions and pressure cycling with a cryogenic medium (LN₂). During hydro-burst testing at a high displacement rate, the strain and damage progression is monitored with Digital-Image-Correlation (DIC) and Acoustic Emission (AE) techniques respectively. The effect of filling with LN₂, pressure cycling and draining on the composite overwrap temperature gradient and strain evolution is additionally obtained with Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs) and thermocouples. Utilization of AE helped to reveal the different damage mechanisms occurring and enabled the evaluation of the pressure window of the multi-sphere. The experimental measurements in the cryogenic regime verified the suitability of the involved stiffness and coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) fitting functions developed in [32] that enable to establish of a relationship between strain and temperature during cryogenic chill-down and pressure cycling. This study provides a framework about the suitability of conformal Type IV multi-spherical COPVs for cryogenic storage. ... Read more

In the field of cryogenic storage, the medium inside the pressure vessel is in a liquid state and thus is incompressible. Therefore the storage tank should be designed in a way, that makes the best possible use of the available space within an aircraft. A composite-overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) based on intersecting spheres (multi-sphere) provides a volumetrically efficient solution and leads to weight savings, due to reduced hoop stresses and less required thermal insulation. The latter is the result of the minimization of passive heat in the cryogenic liquid, associated with the fact that spheres have the minimum surface area for a given volume. In the present work, a numerical and experimental study of a novel multi-spherical COPV with a plastic liner was performed. A thermo-mechanical model based on Finite Element Analysis (FEA) was developed to assess the effect of cryogenic operation at the structure. The model incorporated the dependency of engineering properties and coefficient of thermal expansion of the composite overwrap and liner materials to temperature, in order to describe the structural response to cryogenic temperatures more accurately. This dependency was determined through using approximation functions based on results from material coupon testing. The temperature profile and strain response of the tank were assessed through thermocouples and Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs) respectively throughout the cryogenic chill-down and pressure cycling test. The experimental results verified the accuracy of the involved stiffness and CTE functions and the FE analysis with average offset of 10 [%]. The most important outcome from the study is the absence of damage in the composite overwrap after cryonic chill-down and pressure cycling, which can be regarded as positive indication of the suitability of Type IV multi-spherical COPVs for cryogenic storage applications. ... Read more

In this paper, we used the efficient formulation of the approximated transfer matrix model (ATMM) for the analysis of fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensors' response under anti-symmetrical strain fields. Exploiting the flexible representation of the transfer matrices in this new model, we will analytically prove that any sort of anti-symmetrical strain distribution over the length of a uniformFBG sensor will result in symmetrical reflected spectra. This phenomenon had been already observed in the literature, but proving it using the classical transfer matrix model was laborious and impractical. The same discussion will be extended to the grating distribution of the FBG sensors as well. A special case of an anti-symmetrical grating distribution could be the linearly chirped FBG sensor (LCFBG), in which the grating distribution is linearly increasing over the length of the FBG. Using computer simulations, it can be seen that such a grating distribution will result in perfectly symmetrical reflected spectra. Therefore, we expect that a well-produced LCFBG, should also have a close to symmetrical reflected spectra, and deviation from this symmetry could possibly indicate undesirable birefringence effects. ... Read more

In the past few decades, fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensors have gained a lot of attention in the field of distributed point strain measurement. One of the most interesting properties of these sensors is the presumed linear relationship between the strain and the peak wavelength shift of the FBG reflected spectra. However, subjecting sensors to a non-uniform stress field will in general result in a strain estimation error when using this linear relationship. In this paper we propose a new strain estimation algorithm that accurately estimates the mean strain value in the case of smooth non-uniform strain distributions. To do so, we first introduce an approximation of the classical transfer matrix model, which we will refer to as the approximated transfer matrix model (ATMM). This model facilitates the analysis of FBG reflected spectra under arbitrary strain distributions, particularly by providing a closed-form approximation of the side-lobes of the reflected spectra. Based on this new formulation, we derive a maximum likelihood estimator of the mean strain value. The algorithm is validated using both computer simulations and experimental FBG measurements. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, which typically introduce errors of tens of microstrains, the proposed method is able to compensate for this error. In the typical examples that were analysed in this study, mean strain errors of around 60° were compensated. ... Read more

The previously described approximated transfer matrix model (ATMM) provides insight into the strain distribution along on fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensor. In this paper we study the influence of matrix cracks in composites on the angular frequency of the side-lobes of the FBG reflection spectra in frequency space. ... Read more

This paper describes a new method for the classification and identification of two major types of defects in composites, namely delamination and matrix cracks, by classification of the spectral features of fibre Bragg grating (FBG) signals. In aeronautical applications of composites, after a damage is detected, it is very useful to know the type of damage prior to determining the treatment method of the area or perhaps replacing the part. This was achieved by embedding FBG sensors inside a glass-fibre composite, and analysing the output signal from the sensors. The glass-fibre coupons were subjected to mode-I loading under tension-compression and static tests, in order to induce matrix cracks and delamination damages respectively. Afterwards, using wavelet features extracted from spectral measurements of the FBG sensors, classification of the damage type was carried out by means of support vector machines as a general classification tool with a quadratic kernel. ... Read more

In this paper the behaviour of fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensors under non-uniform strain distributions was analysed. Using the fundamental matrix approach, the length of the FBG sensor was discretised, with each segment undergoing different strain values. FBG sensors that are embedded inside composites, also undergo such non-uniform strain distributions, when located in the vicinity of failures such as matrix cracks or delamination of layers. This non-uniform strain distribution was created in an experimental setup. Finite element analysis was used to analytically model the strain distribution along the FBG length. The measured FBG outputs were then compared to the simulated results. There was a high amplitude correlation between the results of the measured and the simulated reflection spectra with a maximum of 0.97 among all cases. ... Read more