Aircraft operators are faced with increasing requirements to extend the service life of air platforms beyond their designed life cycles, resulting in heavy maintenance and inspection burdens as well as economic pressure. Structural health monitoring (SHM) based on advanced sensor technology is potentially a cost-effective approach to meet operational requirements, and to reduce maintenance cost...

A distributed sensor system is highly desirable for detecting, locating, and monitoring fine cracks at unknown locations in advanced ceramics. This paper presents a distributed high-resolution fiber optic sensor based on the Brillouin scattering principle, and its application in ceramic crack detection for the first time. The existence of cracks, together with their locations, is identified by ...

A reflective type fiber optic angular displacement sensor has recently been developed, which consists of a light source, an optical isolator, a four-port single-mode fiber bidirectional coupler, and a light intensity detection system (two silicon photodetectors and ananalog divider). By using a normal He-Ne laser with &2% stability in light intensity, we have achieved an angle resolution of 10e...

(Abstract) The health monitoring of smart structures in civil engineering is becoming more and more important as in-situ structural monitoring would greatly reduce structure life-cycle costs and improve reliability. The distributed strain and temperature sensing is highly desired in large structures where strain and temperature at over thousand points need to be measured simultaneously. It is d...

A white-light fiber-optic interferometer working in the spatial domain, using a special three-peak-wavelength LED as a light source and one of the two arms of the Michelson interferometer as a strain sensor, is presented. Based on the Gaussian spectrum distribution function, a simple spectrum-decomposing method is used to describe the special three-peak-wavelength LED source. Experimental and t...

Distributed fiber-optic vibration sensors receive extensive investigation and play a significant role in the sensor panorama. Optical parameters such as light intensity, phase, polarization state, or light frequency will change when external vibration is applied on the sensing fiber. In this paper, various technologies of distributed fiber-optic vibration sensing are reviewed, from interferomet...