Intellectual parachute monitoring system based on twisted fiber optic sensors

Oleg G. Morozov, Gennady A. Morozov, Mikhail Yu. Zastela

For any parachute system, it is important to predict the opening forces it will experience in order to make a safe and economic choice of materials to be used. Pre-design researches on creation of the built-in parachute parameters monitoring system that can be used both at a stage of its tests, and at stage of its control for the purpose of its characteristics management are resulted. Fiber optic sensor based on two twisted fibers with the locked ends offered by us for this purpose does not demand lamination, is indifferent to a temperature field, and provides a wide dynamic range of measurement as pressure and tension of parachute elements. Developed fiber optic sensors have variable twisting step and have been used for creation of intellectual knots of perspective vehicles, in particular, parachute canopies and slings. We decided to change our measuring procedure from checking of transmitted power or its Rayleigh scattering in different ends of twisted fibers onto Brillouin scattering characterization. For this situation, we offered the kind of frequency variation method to get the information about the frequency shift and Q-factor of the Brillouin scattering in each sensor.