This paper describes progress towards the development and demonstration of a distributed fiber optic acoustic emission sensor (FAESense™) system for the in-situ unattended detection and localization of structural damage caused by shock events, impacts, fractures, cracks, voids, corrosion, and delaminations in new and aging infrastructures found in the petroleum and chemical industries, solar and wind power plants, nuclear, coal, and gas utilities industries, in civil and geophysical engineering, biomedical engineering, aerospace and naval industries, and transportation security. The FAESense™ system is based on the use of a novel two-wave mixing interferometer produced on a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) microchip.
Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) is a mature sensing technology for the measurement of strain, vibration, acoustics, acceleration, pressure, temperature, moisture, and corrosion. It has gained rapid acceptance in civil, aerospace, chemical and petrochemical, medicine, aviation and automotive industries. The most prominent advantages of FBG are: small size and light weight, distributed array of FBG transducers on a single fiber, and immunity to radio frequency interference. However, a major disadvantage of FBG technology is that conventional state-of-the-art FBG interrogation system is typically bulky, heavy, and costly bench top instruments that are typically assembled from off-the-shelf fiber optic and optical components integrated with a signal electronics board into an instrument console. Based on the industrial need for a compact FBG interrogation system, this paper describes recent progress towards the development of miniature fiber Bragg grating sensor interrogator (FBG-Transceiver™) system based on multi-channel monolithic integrated optic sensor microchip technology. The integrated optic microchip technology enables monolithic integration of all functionalities, both passive and active, of conventional bench top FBG sensor interrogator system, packaged in a miniaturized, low power operation, 2 cm×5 cm small form factor (SFF) package suitable for long-term structural health monitoring in applications where size, weight, and power are critical for operation.
Our research group at Redondo Optics and support collaborators have been working on developing novel methods for weaving fiber optic sensors within high performance synthetic textile materials used in the manufacturing of “Smart” fabrics. Specifically, our group has investigated and developed automated manufacturing techniques for weaving and braiding glass and plastic optical fiber sensors within the strands and yarns of the produced textiles. The weaved fiber sensors – Microbend & FBGs Strain and Temperature, DCS & DBS Chemical & Biological – and support wearable electronics and power are used to monitor stress, strain, fatigue, load and movement, temperature, pressure, respiration and hearth rates, and body sweat chemical and biological constituents, and to transmit this information in real time to wearable communication devices for global dissemination to key intelligence sources. In the paper we provide on-going results on the use of the DIFOS technology for the global measurement of strain in high performance applications such as supersonic parachute canopies and strength member ropes, to jet fighter arresting gear cables in aircraft carriers.
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