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Fiber Optic Sensors for Industrial Applications: Perspectives, Challenges and New Trends
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Europe/Zurich
30/7-010 (CERN)
Description
Abstract:
Over the past two decades, fiber-optic technology has revolutionized the telecommunications industry, enabling high-capacity, long-distance communications and networking at staggeringly low costs.
Fiber sensing—the use of fiber optics for industrial sensing applications—is another exciting growth area for this versatile technology. Some ideas indeed have made the leap from the laboratory into the highly competitive market of sensor technology.
This transition has taken the better part of 20 years and reached the point where fiber sensors enjoy increased acceptance as well as a widespread use for structural sensing and monitoring applications in civil engineering, aerospace, marine, oil & gas, composites, smart structures, bio-medical devices, electric power industry and many others. Optical fiber sensor operation and instrumentation have become well understood and developed. And a variety of commercial discrete sensors based on Fabry-Perot (FP) cavities and fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), as well as distributed sensors based on Raman and Brillouin scattering methods, are readily available along with pertinent interrogation instruments. Among all of these, FBG based sensors—more than any other particular sensor type—have become widely known, researched and popular within and out the photonics community and seen a rise in their utilization and commercial growth. Given the capability of FBGs to measure a multitude of parameters such as strain, temperature, pressure, chemical and biological agents and many others coupled with their flexibility of design to be used as single point or multi-point sensing arrays and their relative low cost, make them ideal devices to be adopted for a multitude of different sensing applications and implemented in different fields and industries.
This lecture reviews the major milestones of their technological evolution during the thirty years from the discovery of Kenneth Hill in 1978. Further, the lecture includes an overview of the major developments carried out at University of Sannio aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology to provide suitable solutions for strategic industrial sectors.
Finally, last part of this contribute is devoted to highlight a novel technological vision, here named “Lab on Fiber Technology”, where optical fibers and nanotechnologies are strongly combined to provide highly functionalized technological platforms completely integrated in a single optical fiber that enabling the development of advanced devices, components and sub-systems to be incorporated in modern optical systems for communication and sensing applications. The realization of such integrated optical fibre devices requires that several structures and materials at nano and micro scale are constructed, embedded and connected all together to provide the necessary physical connections and light-matter interactions. Main strategies, achievements and related devices are presented discussing perspectives and challenges that lie ahead.
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