Vibration measurement on composite material with embedded optical fiber based on phase-OTDR

Distributed sensors based on phase-optical time-domain reflectometry (phase-OTDR) are suitable for aircraft health monitoring due to electromagnetic interference immunity, small dimensions, low weight and flexibility. These features allow the fiber embedment into aircraft structures in a nearly non-intrusive way to measure vibrations along its length. The capability of measuring vibrations on avionics structures is of interest for what concerns the study of material fatigue or the occurrence of undesirable phenomena like flutter. In this work, we employed the phase-OTDR technique to measure vibrations ranging from some dozens of Hz to kHz in two layers of composite material board with embedded polyimide coating 0.24 numerical aperture single-mode optical fiber.