The technology of fiber Bragg grating or FBG is widely used in numerous sensing technology fields of application. For example, today FBG pressure sensors are installed to detect the leakage process of prestressed concrete cylinder pipe. This type of pressure sensor is based on the use of a Bourdon tube with two fiber Bragg gratings attached on its outside and inside surfaces.
Such a wider sensing application is caused by an increasingly large number of attractive characteristics of FBG sensors that include intrinsic safety, immunity to electromagnetic fields, remote sensing, and large multiplexing capabilities. Therefore, the pressure parameter remains the most important physical factor in the process industry.
Nevertheless, conventional pressure sensors based on electrical train gauge, vibration wire, mechanics have several disadvantages that include the absence of the ability to withstand harsh environmental conditions with critical electromagnetic interference, adventurous chemicals, or explosion matters. Moreover, such sensing systems do not allow making pressure’s multipoint measurement and online monitoring at a long distance.
It should be noted that the intrinsic pressure sensitivity of an FBG sensor is considered to be about 3.04 pm/MPa, which is quite a low index for the practical pressure measurement. Despite numerous ways proposed to increase the sensitivity factor of FBG pressure sensors, such as the installation of FBG in polymer, soldering metal-coated FBGs on a free elastic cylinder, and embedding the FBG fiber to a diaphragm, all these techniques propose relatively complex structures which are difficult to produce.
The thing is that the prestressed concrete cylinder pipe is widely used for water transportation in different areas, for example, municipal, industrial, and plant piping systems. Thus, the role of FBG pressure sensors for security monitoring and reliability management of huge cylinder pipes remains very important because now the sensing technology still faces numerous challenges.
Nevertheless, the use of a Bourdon tube in FBG pressure sensors as the spring element allows detecting spring elements. Herewith, the measurement sensitivity increases and becomes 1.414 pm/kPa in a range from 0 to 1 MPa while the correlative coefficient is 99.949%. That is the reason why the development of a totally new pressure sensor is planned, which probably finds new FBG sensing applications of pressure quasi-distributed measurement or online monitoring in industry and manufacture fields.
If you want to obtain a highly efficient sensing system, you should choose the Optromix company. Optromix is a manufacturer of innovative fiber optic products for the global market. The company provides the most technologically advanced fiber optic solutions for monitoring worldwide. Optromix is a fast-growing vendor of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) products line such as fiber Bragg grating sensors, FBG interrogators and multiplexers, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) systems, distributed temperature sensing (DTS) systems. If you are interested in FBG sensors and want to learn more, please contact us at info@optromix.com