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Due to their small size, light weight, geometric flexibility and their possible uses for monitoring various different physical parameters, optical fiber sensor technology offers numerous opportunities and advantages for instrumenting structures and materials for their analysis and control. While optical fiber sensors have advantages over conventional electric sensors, connectorization of optical fiber sensors to the supporting laser, detector and electronics has proven to be difficult. The conventional approach to connecting the embedded optical fiber sensors, bringing the optical fiber leads out of the material, creates obvious points of failure at the points where the fiber enters and exits the material, and greatly complicates the process of joining adjacent structural elements, each containing sensor fibers which must be connected. In this paper we demonstrate the possibility of having an optical fiber sensor system that can be completely embedded within composite materials. The fiber sensor as well as the supporting opto-electronic components required to launch and receive light into and from the fiber could be embedded in a panel, avoiding connector problems. Interaction with the electronics to obtain strain and vibration measurements from the fiber sensor was made via external antenna coils.

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