Review on Strain Monitoring of Aircraft : Using Optical Fibre Sensor

Structural health monitoring of aircraft assures safety, integrity and reduces cost-related concerns by reducing the number of times maintenance is required. Under aerodynamic loading, aircraft is subjected to strain, in turn causing damage and breakdown. This paper presents a review of experimental works, which focuses on monitoring strain of various parts of aircraft using optical fibre sensors. In addition, this paper presents a discussion and review on different types of optical fibre sensors used for structural health monitoring (SHM) of aircraft. However, the focus of this paper is on fibre bragg gratings (FBGs) for strain monitoring. Here, FBGs are discussed in detail because they have proved to be most viable and assuring technology in this field. In most cases of strain monitoring, load conditioning and management employs finite element method (FEM). However, more effort is still required in finding the accurate positions in real time where the sensors can be placed in the structure and responds under complex deformation.