In this paper, a new damage feature, spectral area, was extracted to effectively detect crack location by studying the deformation mechanism of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) reflection spectra. In order to verify the robustness and reliability of spectral area to detect crack location, the following work was carried out: Firstly, the strain information was extracted by extended finite element method (XFEM) with fatigue crack propagation. The transmission matrix method (TMM) was used to simulate FBG reflection spectra using numerical results. Secondly, the fatigue crack growth monitoring experiment based on FBG sensors was carried out, and the digital image correlation (DIC) method was used to measure the strain values at the placement of FBG sensors with crack propagation. The temperature characteristic test of FBG was carried out to investigate the influence of temperature variation on the spectral area. The results presented that the spectral area was insensitive to temperature variation and experimental noise, and was greatly sensitive to the complex non-uniform strain field cause by crack damage. Moreover, compared with the 5 mm FBG sensor, the 10 mm FBG sensor showed a larger critical detection range for crack damage. Therefore, the spectral area can be used as a reliable damage feature to detect the crack location quantitatively based on the simulated and experimental results.
Keywords: FBG sensor; crack location detection; spectral area; structural health monitoring.