A simple and compact fiber bending sensor based on the Mach-Zehnder interferometer was proposed. A photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with a length of 10 mm was spliced by collapsing air holes with two conventional single mode fibers to consist of an all fiber bending sensor. The sensitivity of 0.53 nm/m-1 was obtained at 1586 nm for the curvature range from 0 to 8.514 m-1. The temperature sensitivity was very low. The measurement error due to the temperature effect was about 8.68×10-3 m-1/℃, and the temperature effect in the curvature measurement could be ignored. This device can avoid the cross sensitivity of the temperature in the curvature measurement.

Acoustic sensing is nowadays a very demanding field which plays an important role in modern society, with applications spanning from structural health monitoring to medical imaging. Fiber-optics can bring many advantages to this field, and fiber-optic acoustic sensors show already performance levels capable of competing with the standard sensors based on piezoelectric transducers. This review presents the recent advances in the field of fiber-optic dynamic strain sensing, particularly for acoustic detection. Three dominant technologies are identified-fiber Bragg gratings, interferometric Mach-Zehnder, and Fabry-Perot configurations-and their recent developments are summarized.

A tilt sensor based on an intermodal photonic crystal fiber (PCF) interferometer is demonstrated. The sensor consists of a tubular filled with NaCl aqueous solutions and an intermodal PCF interferometer, which is formed by using a short PCF with two single-mode fibers (SMFs) spliced at both ends, and the air-holes in the splice regions are fully collapsed. The intermodal PCF interferometer is fixed in a rigid glass tubular with a slant orientation, and a half of the PCF is immersed in the NaCl aqueous solutions, while the other half is exposed in air. When tilting the tubular, the length of the PCF immersed changes so that the transmission spectrum moves. Therefore, by monitoring the wavelength shift, the tilt angle can be achieved. In the experiment, a 0.8-cm-length intermodal PCF interferometer was adopted. The sensitivity of the proposed sensor was obtained from -1.5461 nm/° to -30.1244 nm/° when measuring from -35.1° to 37.05°.

A Lithium niobate (LiNbO3) based integrated optical E-field sensor with an optical waveguide Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and a tapered antenna has been designed and fabricated for the measurement of the pulsed electric field. The minimum detectable E-field of the sensor was 10 kV/m. The sensor showed a good linear characteristic while the input E-fields varied from 10 kV/m to 370 kV/m. Furthermore, the maximum detectable E-field of the sensor, which could be calculated from the sensor input/output characteristic, was approximately equal to 1000 kV/m. All these results suggest that such sensor can be used for the measurement of the lighting impulse electric field.

In this paper, we present a micro-displacement sensor formed by the fixed and movable photonic crystal slabs. In this sensor, a waveguide was created by changing the radius of holes rather than removing them. At a proper operating wavelength, the structure could be used as the micro-displacement sensor. The results revealed that the micro-displacement sensor had a sensitivity of 3.6 μm-1, the Q-factor was nearly 180, and the sensing range was 0.0 μm-0.5 μm. The properties of the micro-displacement sensor are also analyzed theoretically and verified using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method carried out using the software (Rsoft).

Four distributed feedback fiber lasers with dual-wavelength operations were studied experimentally in detail. The laser characteristics of these distributed feedback fiber lasers (DFB-FLs) were investigated. The operation conditions for the dual-wavelength output are analyzed and presented. Through this study, the guidance of the design and fabrication of some dual-wavelength distributed feedback fiber lasers are provided.

Two measuring methods of the wide absorption spectrum by distributed feedback laser diodes (DFB-LDs) are presented in detecting the water vapor absorption line. One is the subsection scanning method, and it takes advantage of the wide spectrum tuning range by the temperature modulation and fast spectrum tuning speed by current modulation. Specifically, this method is realized by dividing a target spectral region into several sections which correspond to the specific temperature of DFB-LD, scanning every section by current modulation for hundreds times, and averaging the data to raise the signal to noise ratio (SNR), then combining all sections to get the whole spectrum. An accuracy of 10 ppmv had been obtained in the measurement of water vapor with a 10-cm path length by this method. Another is data fitting method, based on the absorption line-shape function; the absorption line can be described by fitting with partial measured data. The fitting absorption line was fitted well with the measured data, and the square of correlation coefficient (R-square) was no less than 0.99.

In order to ensure the testing range and long-term reliability of the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) used for the smart cable, a smart cable embedded with FBG strain sensors based on the desensitized encapsulation structure was designed. For a smart cable specimen, the fatigue loading experiments with the cycle from 100 thousands to 2 million and 0.95 times nominal breaking cable force (Pb) were carried out, which tested the long-serving effects of the smart cable. The test results of the static tension loading and unloading during the stepwise fatigue cycle process showed that the encapsulated FBG strain sensors had the good linearity and repeatability. Also all sensors survived after 2 million times fatigue cycle. 0.95Pb static tension test showed that the encapsulated FBG strain sensors embedded inside the cable reached 4.5% testing accuracy in the 0.86Pb working range. After 0.95Pb static tension test, the dissection test was carried out by breaking the force tension. The results showed that the appearances of the encapsulated sensors were good, and the design structures were not changed and damaged.

A novel optical microfiber asymmetric Fabry-Perot interferometric (MAFPI) sensor is developed for simultaneous measurement of force and temperature. The MAFPI structure is formed by a weak fiber Bragg grating (FBG), a section of the microfiber, and a cleaved fiber end surface. The narrowband beam reflected from the low-reflectivity FBG and the broadband beam from the Fresnel reflection interfere lead to its unique sensing performance. The force sensing is performed by detecting the bending-loss induced fringe contrast changes, while the Bragg wavelength shift is employed for temperature measurement. Sensitivities of 9.8 pm/℃ and 0.025 dB/μN were obtained experimentally for temperature and force measurements, respectively.

In this paper, a two-dimensional photonic crystal (2DPC) based pressure sensor is proposed and designed, and the sensing characteristics such as the sensitivity and dynamic range are analyzed over the range of pressure from 0 GPa to 7 GPa. The sensor is based on 2DPC with the square array of silicon rods surrounded by air. The sensor consists of two photonic crystal quasi waveguides and L3 defect. The L3 defect is placed in between two waveguides and is formed by modifying the radius of three Si rods. It is noticed that through simulation, the resonant wavelength of the sensor is shifted linearly towards the higher wavelength region while increasing the applied pressure level. The achieved sensitivity and dynamic range of the sensor is 2 nm/GPa and 7 Gpa, respectively.

The high efficiency hydrogen fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor is presented. The sensitive film was a new alliance of palladium-silver (Pd-Ag). In addition, the titanium (Ti) layer was used as the adhesive layer. The presented sensor showed the resolution of more than 60 pm/1% H2, and a fast response time of 4 s-5 s was guaranteed in the 0.1% H2-4% H2 range. Moreover, the life time of the sensor was investigated. The obtained results showed that the sensor had an enhanced life time. Furthermore, the sensor was applied in the propulsion system fuel tank model of the aerospace vehicle. The obtained results indicated that it is a prevention system against the disaster aerospace due to hydrogen leakage.

A distributed feedback (DFB) fiber laser with a ratio of the backward to forward output power of 1:100 was composed by a 45-mm-length asymmetrical phase-shifted fiber grating fabricated on the 50-mm erbium-doped photosensitive fiber. Forward output laser was amplified using a certain length of Nufern EDFL-980-Hp erbium-doped fiber to absorb the surplus pump power after the active phase-shifted fiber grating and get population inversion. By using OptiSystem software, the best fiber length of the EDFL to get the highest gain was simulated. In order to keep the amplified laser with the narrow line-width and low noise, a narrow-band light filter consisting of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) with the same Bragg wavelength as the laser and an optical circulator was used to filter the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise of the out-cavity erbium-doped fiber. The designed laser structure sufficiently utilized the pump power, and a DFB fiber laser with the 32.5-mW output power, 11.5-kHz line width, and -87-dB/Hz relative intensity noise (RIN) at 300 mW of 980 nm pump power was brought out.

The fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensing technology is used to dynamically monitor multiple parameters of railway switch machine poles, including time of movement, direction and quantity of loading and locking force, and states of loading resistance. This paper presents the design and implementation of a railway switch pole strain on-line monitoring system based on the FBG stress-sensibilized monitor for a Siemens S700K switch machine. The ring shape FBG strain gauge and stress-sensibilized methods significantly increased the monitoring sensitivity. Installing approaches adapted the harsh environment in the railway application. The monitoring results showed the high sensitivity and high reliability of this monitoring system. This application provides a long-term and on-line detecting method which could meet railway switch condition monitoring demands of more than 100,000 switch machines in the country.

A hardware/software field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based driver system was proposed and demonstrated for the KAF-39000 large area high resolution charge coupled device (CCD). The requirements of the KAF-39000 driver system were analyzed. The structure of “microprocessor with application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chips” was implemented to design the driver system. The system test results showed that dual channels of imaging analog data were obtained with a frame rate of 0.87 frame/s. The frequencies of horizontal timing and vertical timing were 22.9 MHz and 28.7 kHz, respectively, which almost reached the theoretical value of 24 MHz and 30 kHz, respectively.

In recent years, fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) have been widely used in ultrasonic detection for practical structural health monitoring in light of its unique advantages over the conventional sensors. Although FBGs have been successfully tested in ultrasonic inspection, the effect of the grating length on the sensitivity of the FBG ultrasonic sensing system is yet to be analyzed. Hence, using the simulation model, the main influencing factor on the sensitivity of the ultrasonic sensing system with different lengths gratings was first investigated. In the following experiment, the ultrasonic responses of the sensing system with six different lengths FBGs were obtained, respectively. The theoretical analysis and the experimental results would be useful for sensitivity improvement of the FBG-based ultrasonic and acoustic emission sensing system.