Structural Health Monitoring Suitable for Airborne Components Using the Speckle Pattern in Plastic Optical Fibers

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a key factor for the correct operation in large dimension structures. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate the application of a distributed optical sensor, suitable for SHM, based on the evaluation of the speckle pattern at the output of a polymer optical fibers, aiming to evaluate the damage imposed to airborne metallic and composite structures. We propose also several algorithms to analyze the speckle data and access the imposed mechanical perturbation. The maximum sampling frequency of this method is limited by the image acquisition devices, yielding to a value of 15 Hz in our case.