What are Fiber Optic Sensor and Its Types? Find Out!

Fiber optic sensor is also called optic sensor that use optical fiber or sensing element. These sensors are basically used to sense some quantities like pressure, vibration, temperature, displacement, concentration or rotation of chemical species. They have so many uses in the field of remote sensing because they don’t require electrical power at the remote location.

Fiber optic sensor is best for insensitive condition including noise, high vibration, extreme heat, wet, and unstable environment and can easily fit in small areas and also can be positioned correctly where flexible fibers are needed. 

In intrinsic fiber optic sensor, the sensors depend on the properties of the optical fiber itself to convert environmental action into the modulation of the light and sense takes place within the fiber itself. Intrinsic fiber optic sensor provides distributed sensing over long-range distances and it is the most beneficial feature of it. 

In this sensor, the fiber may be used as information carriers that show the way to a black box. Extrinsic fiber optic sensor generates a light signal depending on the information arrived at the black box and the black box may be made of mirror, gas or any other mechanism that generates an optical signal. These sensors are basically used to measure rotation, vibration velocity, displacement, torque, twisting and acceleration and provide excellent protection for measurement signals against noise corruption. 

These sensors require more light and use multi-mode large core fibers. The advantage of intensity based fiber optic sensor is low cost, ability to perform as real distributed sensors, very simple to implement, and possibility of being multiplexed, etc. 

It is important for a certain class of sensors and this property of polarization based fiber optic sensor can be simply modified by various external variables and used for the measurement of a range of parameters, communication, and single processing application.

This sensor is used to change emitter light on information signal where the signal is observed by the phase-based fiber optic sensor. When a light beam is passed through interferometer then the light divides into two beams, where one beam is exposed into sensing environment and the other beam is isolated from the sensing environment that’s used as a reference.

This is a device that’s used to transform chemical information into the form of a measurable physical signal which is associated with the concentration of a certain chemical species. It is an important component of an analyzer that may include some devices that perform signal processing, sampling and data processing. 

These are some different types of fiber optic sensors based on sensor location, operating principles, and their application.