Fiber Bragg grating sensors for on-line welding diagnostics

On-line monitoring of an arc-welding process is performed in this paper by means of fiber Bragg grating transducers (FBGs) in two different configurations. FBGs were glued to the plate surfaces next to the weld joint, and a FBG transducer was designed to sense the perturbations in the air surrounding the welding plasma column. Sensitivity to both temperature and vibrations during the process was analyzed during several tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding tests, showing the feasibility of the proposed design to perform an on-line detection of different welding perturbations. To enhance the analysis, a setup based on plasma optical spectroscopy was also employed to allow a comparison among the response of both techniques to the appearance of these perturbations.