Monitoring of thermal protection systems using robust self-organizing optical fiber sensing networks

Structural Health Monitoring systems are envisaged to provide two criticallyimportant capabilities for the health monitoring of future aerospace vehicles: detectingstructural damage and performing comprehensive structural monitoring. The goal of thiswork is to bring together in a consistent topology, technological approaches developed byNASA Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific andIndustrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in an integrated system demonstration on largescale aerospace vehicle structures. This is a continuation of efforts through previouscontracts with NASA to utilize innovations based on technologies developed by CSIRO. This research and development activity will develop and demonstrate a structural healthmonitoring system for thermal protection systems (TPS) that incorporates piezoelectricacoustic emission (AE) sensors to detect the occurrence and location of damaging impacts,and an optical fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor network to evaluate the effect ofdetected damage on the thermal conductivity of the TPS material.