The Israeli Air Force Efforts in Implementing Fiber-Optic Nervous Systems in Composite Based Air Vehicles for Damage Estimation and Performance Analysis

Composite structures lack retirement time assessments and their operational integrity highly depends on the manufacturing process and operational history. Furthermore, due to their material diversity and variability among structures, in many cases their integrity cannot be easily examined by standard non-destructive inspections. For these reasons, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has been adopting and developing global structural integrity and health monitoring methodologies based on fiber-optic point and distributed sensing technologies, aiming at providing early warnings before failure, smarter utilization and condition-based maintenance for best availability of IAF Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) fleets. As of today, the Fiber Optic Sensing (FOS) infrastructure is recording real-time measurements of strain, temperature and vibrations in operational flights. This paper describes the IAF efforts in implementing fiber-optic nervous systems in composite-based air vehicles, including the use of damage detection algorithms.