Investigations of Marine Safety Improvements by Structural Health Monitoring Systems

The paper presents a first approach of the structural health monitoring (SHM) system, dedicat-ed to marine structures. The considered system is based on the fibre optic (FO) technique with Fibre Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors. The aim of this research is recognition of possible practical applications of the FO techniques in selected elements of marine structures. SHM and damage detection techniques have a great im-portance (economical, human safety and environment protection) in the wide range of marine structures, es-pecially for ships and offshore platforms. The investigations reported in this paper have shown major poten-tial of FBG sensors. They are suitable for strain–stress field and load monitoring of the wide range real structures used in different conditions. The FO sensors technology appears as very attractive in many practical applications of future SHM systems.