Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publisher
IEEE Computer Society
Faculty
Faculty of Health, Engineering and Science
School
Centre for Communications Engineering Research
RAS ID
19034
Abstract
In this work, we present the concept of planar polymer photonic waveguides for the health monitoring of aerospace structures. Here a polymer layer is deposited onto the material/structure to be monitored. Within the polymer layer, waveguides are created after deposition. These waveguides can then be used as 'optical fibres' for optical fibre sensing methodologies. In investigating the use of polymer photonic waveguides the question to be answered is: does the strain in the test material transfer to the polymer layer, such that the value to be measured optically is reliable and indicative of the true strain in the test structure? To answer this question we have conducted a preliminary structural analysis with finite element analysis, utilising ANSYS. A simple aluminium cantilever was used as the test structure, and layers of polyethylene with different thicknesses were added to this. Result show that the thinner the layer of polymer, the more accurate the measured strain will be. For a 100um coating, the difference is strain was observed to be on the order of 3.3%.
DOI
10.1109/MetroAeroSpace.2014.6865999
Access Rights
free_to_read
Comments
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of: Wild G., Fox B., Magniez K., Hinckley S., Wade S., & Carman G. (2014). Investigating strain transfer in polymer coated structures for the health monitoring of aerospace vehicles using polymer photonic waveguides. 2014 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Aerospace, MetroAeroSpace 2014 - Proceedings. (pp. 622-626). Benevento, Italy. IEEE Computer Society. © 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Available here