Addressing fiber optic sensors limitations for aircraft applications

Advances in sensors and sensors networks have significantly shaped the fundamental approach to dealing with traditional health monitoring problems within the aerospace community. Sensors with increased networking capability are seen to constitute the nervous system for any envisaged aircraft diagnostics, prognostics and health management (DPHM) system. Highly multiplexed fiber Bragg grating optical fibers immerged as one of the leading technologies for potential development of an integrated global airframe DPHM system. In this paper, we identify key limitations of this technology and propose an approach to address two of these limitations; namely, temperature compensated measurement and miniaturized demodulation system. Our experimental development illustrated the potential of the approach taken to deal with temperature compensation and suggest proper selection of gratings wavelength. Moreover, it demonstrates the suitability of the developed demodulation system for interrogating highly multiplexed gratings.