Creation of a Support Software for the Development of a System for Sending and Visualizing FBG Sensor Data for Aerospace Application

Abstract

Optical fiber-based sensors have rapidly increased their application fields across multiple engineering sectors. Their physical characteristics, including low weight, electrical passivity, immunity to electromagnetic disturbances, and high sensitivity, make them highly suitable for aerospace applications. A flying test bench was recently developed at the Politecnico di Torino to evaluate the performance of optical sensors applied to an aircraft model. To allows their fruition in near real-time, it was necessary to develop a pipeline of software capable of transmitting, saving, and displaying them on the ground. To carry out in-depth tests on their reliability it is necessary to carry out more tests with different sensors and configurations. However, doing flight tests for the sole purpose of testing the data acquisition system is too expensive and impractical. Therefore, it was developed an emulator software that can generate data like that obtained from the real system, saving time and resources. Thanks to it, it is now possible to exploit the complete test bench on the aircraft for the final verification campaign only. The results are therefore very positive and demonstrate the potential of the emulator also for the most recent applications.