Damage Detection With Guided Waves and Fiber Bragg Grating Sensor Arrays

This paper presents a damage detection and imaging approach using guided waves and through the use of optical fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors for structural health monitoring (SHM) purpose. An FBG array composed with four linearly aligned FBG sensors for guided wave sensing is designed. It is found that FBG sensors are optimized for sensing guided wave coming along the axial direction yet minimized for those along the normal direction. To overcome this limitation and allow for all directional sensing, a FBG phased array beamforming algorithm is derived based on the commonly used delay-and-sum beamforming algorithm principle. The work continues to evaluate the detection capability of the FBG array through two experimental studies on an aluminum plate: (a) guided wave source localization; (b) surface damage detection. The results indicates that both targets are successfully detected and agree well with their actual locations and thus confirms the capability of using presented FBG phased array for rapidly inspecting a large area with limited access.