Optical fiber FBG linear sensing systems for the on-line monitoring of airborne high temperature air duct leakage

Abstract

Electrical sensing systems, such as those involving eutectic salt, are mostly used in connection to leakage from existing airborne high-temperature air-conducting pipelines. Such complex structured systems are susceptible to external interferences and, thus, cannot meet the increasingly strict monitoring needs of a complex air-conducting pipeline system of an aircraft. In view of this point, this paper studies an alternative sensor system based on a dense array fiber grating. To obtain a compact and light-weight airborne signal processing system, a field programmable gate array is used as the main control core that controls the output of the light source. The functions of pulse modulation, analog-to-digital conversion, data buffering and transmission are integrated into a single system, while the linear sensing monitoring is obtained by detecting the time-division and wavelength-division wavelength drift signals of the fiber Bragg grating array. Our experiments show that the spatial resolution of the linear sensing system approaches 5 cm, the temperature measurement accuracy reaches 2 °C, the temperature measurement range is between 0–250 °C, and the response time is within 4 s. Compared with the existing electrical monitoring systems, various monitoring indicators have been greatly improved and have broad application prospects.