Fibre Optic Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring of Aircraft Composite Structures: Recent Advances and Applications.
In-service structural health monitoring of composite aircraft structures plays a key role in the assessment of their performance and integrity. In recent years, Fibre Optic Sensors (FOS) have proved to be a potentially excellent technique for real-time in-situ monitoring of these structures due to their numerous advantages, such as immunity to electromagnetic interference, small size, light weight, durability, and high bandwidth, which allows a great number of sensors to operate in the same system, and the possibility to be integrated within the material. However, more effort is still needed to bring the technology to a fully mature readiness level. In this paper, recent research and applications in structural health monitoring of composite aircraft structures using FOS have been critically reviewed, considering both the multi-point and distributed sensing techniques.
Department of Industrial Engineering-DIN, University of Bologna, Forlì 47121, Italy. raffaella.disante@unibo.it.
Raffaella
R
Di Sante
Brillouin scattering; Rayleigh  scattering; aerospace; aircraft; composite materials; fibre Bragg gratings; fibre optic sensors; lamb waves; smart structures;   structural health monitoring