Development of sensor technology to facilitate in-situ measurement of damage in composite materials for spacecraft applications (final report)

Abstract

This document is a report on the work undertaken at the University of Southampton to develop sensor technology to facilitate in-situ measurement of damage in composite materials for spacecraft applications during the last fourteen months. Work has concentrated on the investigation and evaluation of Bragg grating based optical strain sensors for this application. The results from sensor testing with an existing sensor interrogation technology (produced by H.Geiger) show that this system is capable of detecting impact damage from 11.8-Joule impact even when sensors are distant from the impact site. In addition sensor-reading transients (strain and temperature) are seen which could allow the elucidation of information pertaining to the nature of the impact.
Despite these positive results it is understood that this interrogation technology is at present sub-optimal. Therefore, considerable effort has been expended developing a new interrogation technology. In terms of the initial brief (to enable damage detection and measurement) an improved interrogation system would allow better resolution for damage characterisation and detection of smaller defects. In addition such a system may be better able to characterise impacts. This is seen as the logical extension of the project. High-speed digital photography of the impacts has been used to identify the nature of post impact vibration and acoustic response of CFRP. These results indicate that the recording of sensor transients with a higher sampling rate could provide further information to characterise impacts.

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