Structural Health Monitoring of composite materials gains in importance with the increasing use of Composite structures for safety-related applications, e.g. in aerospace. Because of the material properties of composites, defects often occur inside the structures and raise the demand for integrated sensors. The advantages of optical fibres predestine them not only for the surface-application on composite structures but also for the Integration into composite structures. Even without quasi-distributed sensors such as FBGs or LPGs, the optical fibre itself can be used to measure the structure and occurring events over the entire fibre length by distributed sensing techniques. This paper presents the surface-application of polyimide coated silica optical fibres onto PEEK specimens and the integration of copper and polyimide coated silica optical fibres into an AS-4/PEEK Composite to be used as distributed fibre optic sensors for SHM. Results from distributed measurements by optical backscatter reflectometry based on Rayleigh backscattering are shown.
Strain sensors used for structural health monitoring (SHM) must provide reliable measurement data during their entire service lifetime. To achieve this for fibre optic sensors integrated into composites, the integration of the sensor has to be adapted according to the process conditions. This paper describes the fabrication of thermoplastic composite samples with integrated distributed fibre optic sensors (DFOS) based on copper-nickel and polyimide coated silica optical fibres. The performance of these DFOS as SHM sensors is evaluated in terms of reliability by measurements derived from comparative measurements with resistance strain gauges and from fatigue tests with 10 million load cycles.