Aircraft structures require periodic and scheduled inspection and maintenance operations due to their special operating conditions and the principles of design employed to develop them. Therefore, structural health monitoring has a great potential to reduce the costs related to these operations. Optical fiber sensors applied to the monitoring of aircraft structures provide some advantages over traditional sensors. Several practical applications for structures and engines we have been working on are reported in this article. Fiber Bragg gratings have been analyzed in detail, because they have proved to constitute the most promising technology in this field, and two different alternatives for strain measurements are also described. With regard to engine condition evaluation, we present some results obtained with a reflected intensity-modulated optical fiber sensor for tip clearance and tip timing measurements in a turbine assembled in a wind tunnel.

Our main goal is to provide a comprehensive explanation of the existing differences in bending losses arising from having step-index multimode plastic optical fibers with different cladding thickness and under different types of conditions, namely, the variable bend radius R, the number of fiber turns, or the fiber diameter. For this purpose, both experimental and numerical result of bending losses are presented for different cladding thicknesses and conditions. For the measurements, two cladding thicknesses have been considered: one finite and another infinite. A fiber in air has a finite cladding thickness, and rays are reflected at the cladding-air interface, whereas a fiber covered by oil is equivalent to having an infinite cladding, since the very similar refractive index of oil prevents reflections from occurring at the cladding-oil interface. For the sake of comparison, numerical simulations based on ray tracing have been performed for finite-cladding step-index multimode waveguides. The numerical results reinforce the experimental data, and both the experimental measurements and the computational simulations turn out to be very useful to explain the behavior of refracting and tunneling rays along bent multimode waveguides and along finite-cladding fibers.

We report on the use of a multi-core fibre (MCF) comprising strongly-coupled cores for accurate strain sensing. Our MCF is designed to mode match a standard single mode optical fibre. This allows us to fabricate simple MCF interferometers whose interrogation is carried out with light sources, detectors and fibre components readily available from the optical communications tool box. Our MCF interferometers were used for sensing strain. The sensor calibration was carried out in a high-fidelity aerospace test laboratory. In addition, a packaged MCF interferometer was transferred into field trials to validate its performance under deployment conditions, specifically the sensors were installed in a historical iron bridge. Our results suggest that the MCF strain sensors here proposed are likely to reach the readiness level to compete with other mature sensor technologies, hence to find commercial application. An important advantage of our MCF interferometers is their capability to operate at very high temperatures.

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