A fully self‐powered, natural‐light‐enabled fiber‐optic vibration sensing solution

Abstract

Fiber‐optic sensors have been developed to monitor the structural vibration with advantages of high sensitivity, immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI), flexibility, and capability to achieve multiplexed or distributed sensing. However, the current fiber‐optic sensors require precisely polarized coherent lasers as the lighting sources, which are expensive in cost and suffer from the power supply issues while operating at outdoor environments. This work aims at solving these issues, through developing a fully self‐powered, natural‐light‐enabled approach. To achieve that, a spring oscillator‐based triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), a polymer network liquid crystal (PNLC), and an optical fiber were integrated. The external vibration drove the PNLC to switch its transparency, allowing the variation of the incident natural light in the optical fiber. Compared with the majority of conventional TENG‐based active vibration sensors, the developed paradigm does not suffer from the EMI, without requirements of the signal preamplification which consumes additional energy. The vibration displacement monitoring was performed to validate the sensing effectiveness of the developed paradigm.

Recent Advances in Electronic Skins with Multiple-Stimuli-Responsive and Self-Healing Abilities

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Radiation Damage Mechanisms and Research Status of Radiation-Resistant Optical Fibers: A Review

“…As technologies like laser cutting [1][2][3][4] and fiber optic communication [5][6][7][8] rapidly evolve, optical fibers are seeing increasingly widespread applications across various fields. Beyond traditional communication, optical fibers have found extensive use in recent years in cutting-edge areas such as sensing [9][10][11], measurement [12,13], control [14,15], and data collection [16,17]. These applications extend to diverse environments, including high-energy radiation scenarios [18] like nuclear explosion diagnostics [19], internal monitoring of nuclear reactors [20][21][22], nuclear fuel reprocessing [23], disinfection of medical endoscopes [24,25], underwater fiber optic cable communication [26], and aerospace technology [27], among others.…”

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