Fatigue monitoring of glass fiber reinforced composite using fiber Bragg grating

Glass fiber reinforced composite (GFRC) are widely used in all load bearing industrial applications. It is therefore critical to understand the fatigue characteristic of GFRC to improve the material characteristics of these composites and to prevent any untoward accidents. In this paper we describe the preliminary results of fatigue test on GFRC fabricated using an in-house laboratory scale resin transfer molding system. The fatigue tests are done for different load conditions – tension compression and reverse bending. Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) is embedded into the composite at the manufacturing step for monitoring the strain. The preliminary results of these experiments are presented.