Inverse thermoelastic analysis for thermal and mechanical loads identification using FBG data

Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors have widely been used to monitor temperature and strain distributions as a part of the structural health monitoring system. Since FBG has the sensitivity to the variations in both temperature and strain, a compensation is required to separate the strain or temperature data from the sensor output which is the shift of the grating's Bragg wavelength. The present study develops a computational inverse thermoelastic analysis method to separately identify the thermal and mechanical boundary conditions (loads) from the output of the FBG sensor. Numerical study has been made for a corrugate-core sandwich integral thermal protection system (TPS) to examine the method. The discussion is focused on the computational stability. The results reveal that the identification of the mechanical load is less stable than that of the heat flux. It is also shown that the condition number of a coefficient matrix serves as the index of the stability of the inverse analysis.