In many civil and aerospace structural applications use of composite material systems in both retrofit and new design modes has expanded greatly.The performance benefits from composites such as weight reduction with increased strength,corrosion resistance,and improved thermal and acoustic properties,are balanced by a host of failure modes whose genesis and progression arent yet well understood.As such,structural health monitoring(SHM)plays a key role for in-situ assessment for the purposes of performance/operations optimization,maintenance planning,and overall life cycle cost reduction.In this work,arrays of fiber Bragg grating optical strain sensors are embedded inside a pre-preg composite specimen that was designed by surrogate finite element model simulation,and was subject to both low-energy(non-damaging)impacts at various locations and high-energy damaging impacts at a known location.The impactor was designed along with the panel specimen for very specific energy levels,strain frequency,and strain amplitude response.Results from SHM algorithms developed via hypothesis testing are demonstrated on impact tests in order to determine the efficacy of embedded fiber Bragg grating arrays for assessing structural health of such composites(detection and localization).A specialized ingress/egress connector was also designed to withstand shock testing,and shock test results are included.