What is Fiber Optic Sensor, Its Types and Applications?

The fiber optic sensors are also named optical fiber sensors to use optical fiber or sensing elements. These sensors are used to intellect some quantities like temperature, pressure, vibrations, displacements, rotations, or concentration of chemical species.            

Fibers have numerous uses in the field of distant sensing because they need no electrical power at the remote location and they have a tiny size. Fiber optic sensors are superlative for impervious conditions, including noise, high vibration, risky heat, wet and unbalanced environments. These sensors can effortlessly fit in small areas and can be located properly wherever flexible fibers are required.

The wavelength shift can be designed using a device, visual frequency-domain reflectometry. The time-delay of the fiber optic instruments can be obvious using a device such as an optical time-domain reflectometer. Below, I’m going to share the types and applications of fiber optic sensors.

Types of Fiber Optic Sensor

Base on the application, fiber optic sensors are classified into three types such as chemical sensor, physical sensor, and biomedical sensor.

•  Chemical Sensor

A chemical sensor is a device that is used to transmute chemical info in the form of an assessable physical sign that is related to the attentiveness of a certain chemical species. The chemical sensor is an imperative component of an analyzer and may comprise some devices that achieve the following functions: signal processing, sampling, and data processing. An analyzer may be a vital part of a computerized system.

The working of analyzer rendering to a sampling plan as a function of time performances as a monitor. These sensors contain two functional units: a receptor and a transducer. In the receptor part, the chemical info is altered into energy that may be restrained by the transducer. In the transducer part, the chemical material is changed into an analytical signal and it does not show compassion.

•  Physical Sensor

A physical sensor is an expedient that is made according to physical consequence and nature. These sensors are used to deliver the info about a physical possession of the system. This type of sensor is mostly meant by sensors such as photoelectric sensors, piezoelectric sensors, metal resistance strain sensors, and semiconductor piezo-resistive sensors.

•  Bio-Medical Sensor

A biomedical sensor is an electrical device that is used to transference various non-electrical amounts in biomedical fields into effortlessly measurable electrical amounts. Due to this reason, these sensors are comprised of health care analysis. This sensing technology is crucial to assembling human pathological and physiological information.

Applications of Fiber Optic Devices

Fiber optic sensors are used in a diverse range of applications such as

•  Measurement of physical possessions such as temperature, displacement, velocity, strain in structures of any size or any shape.
•  In real-time, monitoring the physical erection of health.
•  Buildings and bridges, tunnels, dams, heritage structures.
•  Night vision camera, electronic security systems, partial discharge detection, and measuring wheel loads of vehicles.

Conclusion:

Thus, an overview of fiber optic instruments and applications has been deliberated. There are many benefits of using fiber optic sensors for long-distance communiqué that include small in size, light in weight, compactness, high sensitivity, wide bandwidth, etc. All these features make the best use of fiber optic as a sensor.

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Gregory Armstrong Joined: July 7th, 2020