Dynamic Rotor Blade Displacement Tracking with Fiber-Optical Sensors for a Health and Usage Monitoring System

New sensor technologies will be important to realize advanced Health and Usage Monitoring concepts for rotorcrafts. Fiber-optical sensors applied on helicopter rotor blades can be used to identify elastic blade movements, which could then serve as a valuable data source to supply a Health and Usage Monitoring System. Furthermore, the data can be utilized to track the blade tip displacement in real-time. Recent advances in size and maturity of the measurement equipment enables fiber-optical sensors and the interrogator to be placed in the rotating system. In this paper, a modified approach of strain-displacement transformations is presented that calculates the displacement of a rotor blade with nonuniform cross sections in two dimensions, based on surface strain measurements with Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors. Dynamic load cases are validated with laser sensor measurements and the effects of using polynomials of different degrees to approximate the rotor blade shape are analyzed.     «

New sensor technologies will be important to realize advanced Health and Usage Monitoring concepts for rotorcrafts. Fiber-optical sensors applied on helicopter rotor blades can be used to identify elastic blade movements, which could then serve as a valuable data source to supply a Health and Usage Monitoring System. Furthermore, the data can be utilized to track the blade tip displacement in real-time. Recent advances in size and maturity of the measurement equipment enables fiber-optical senso...     »