Entire Life Time Monitoring of Filament Wound Composite Cylinders Using Bragg Grating Sensors: II. Process Monitoring

This article is the second of a series of three papers concerning monitoring of filament wound cylinders using Bragg gratings. In this second part, the tooling presented in Part I is used to embed gratings and thermocouples in filament wound glass reinforced epoxy composite cylinders during fabrication. Bragg grating strain was obtained from wavelength and temperature response, by a calibration technique described here. Results from tests on five cylinders show the Bragg grating’s capability to monitor strain evolution during fabrication, and the capacity to detect several phenomena occurring during cure is established, in addition to quantifying the initial material condition of the cylinder before it enters service.