Guided Waves Mode Filtering Using Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors

Abstract

Guided waves (GW) allow fast inspection of a large area and hence have received great interest from the structural health monitoring (SHM) community. Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors offer several advantages but their use for GW sensing has been limited due to their limited sensitivity. FBG sensors in the edge-filtering configuration have overcome this issue with sensitivity and there is a renewed interest in their use. It has been seen that depending on the ratio of the wavelength of the propagating wave to the gauge length of the FBG, the mechanism of the transduction of the wave measurement is different. A large ratio leads to a more uniform strain over the FBG leading to a shift in the frequency, while a non-uniform strain due to a short wavelength, leads to the peak widening. The present paper studies this phenomena and develops a signal processing technique for the filtering of the modes.