Optical Fiber Sensors: Devices and Interrogation Methods

Abstract

The rise of optical fiber communications in the last three decades has been accompanied with the development of a large number of sensors based on this technology, overcoming in many aspects the characteris-tics of the current electrical sensing systems. Optical fiber sensors pro-vide a wealth of applications in a variety of fields, ranging from struc-tural health monitoring to detection of chemical species. In this article, after enumerating the principal benefits of optical fiber sensors, it is presented a review about the two key aspects of opti-cal fiber sensing system, namely the sensing devices and their interroga-tion methods, respectively. In both parts, the main devices and methods have been included. In the devices section, examples of single-point, multi-point and dis-tributed sensing elements are given. In the same way, a number of inter-rogation methods are briefly described, including standard spectral analysis, interferometry, and time-domain and frequency-domain meth-ods for both point and distributed optical fiber sensing systems.