The Growth and Development Prospects of Worldwide Fiber Optic Sensor Market

FBG sensor marketOptical fiber sensors have seen increased acceptance and widespread use in the scientific world in the last few decades. Against the background of other sensor types, fiber Bragg grating sensors have become widely known and popular. Such FBG sensors are able to measure the various parameters of the substances studied in the research of scientists and engineers. These are such parameters as chemical and biological agents, temperature, strain, pressure, and many others. In addition to this, the optical fiber sensor technology and fiber Bragg grating sensors, in general, have the increased flexibility of design to be used as a single point or multipoint arrays. Also, fiber optic systems and devices based on them have their own relatively low cost that makes them available for use in the different fields and industries. However, it is necessary to actively engage with the problems of increasing the FBG sensors’ attractiveness for business.

Nowadays fiber optic sensors markets are in a relatively early development stage so it is difficult to access and forecast with accuracy. Furthermore, the market segments are fragmented due to the variety of sensing applications and industries where they are applied. The global market of the fiber Bragg grating products is primarily composed of three key segments:

  1. sensing devices (bare FBGs for sensing applications, packed FBG sensors, and FBG arrays)
  2. instrumentation (fiber Bragg grating interrogating instruments and related components: multiplexers, switches, data acquisition systems, software, and graphical user interfaces)
  3. system integration and installation (implementation tools for the fiber optic solutions and fiber optic system installations like design, planning, system integration, customer training, service, etc.)

According to the latest data, the worldwide demand for bare and packaged FBGs is more than 10, 000 pieces per year. And besides that, the worldwide demand for FBG arrays is estimated to be between 100s to 1, 000 arrays per year. The combined present global market size of this segment is between $15M to $35M USD a year with an annual growth rate of 15% to 25%. The total market size of all products in the FBGs product line is estimated to be in excess of $50M USD.

Future applications of FBG sensors will possibly develop over time depending on cost reduction and development of specialized and application-specific packaging. It is expected that more conventional and popular applications such as discrete strain and temperature sensing will continue to evolve and acquire greater market shares. Newer applications in chemical, biological, and medical sensing will lead to the creation of a new generation of fiber optic products that will perform specific agent or parameter sensing functions.

In order for fiber optic products to penetrate into mainstream industrial processes,  appropriate transducers must be developed. FBGs must meet such criteria as ecological strength, appropriate sensitivity, and the correct dynamic range. Also, they need to be early replaceable without a description of the FBGs network and adhere to engineering standards, either existing now. One of the most important conditions for the development of the global market of fiber optic products is seamless integration with existing control system architectures.

Optromix, Inc. is a U.S. manufacturer of innovative fiber optic products for the global market, based in Cambridge, MA. Our team always strives to provide the most technologically advanced fiber optic solutions for our clients. Optromix is a fast-growing vendor of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) products line: fiber Bragg grating sensors, FBG interrogators, and multiplexers, Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) systems. We create and supply a broad variety of top-notch fiber optic solutions for the monitoring of various facilities all over the world. If you would like to purchase FBG sensors, please contact us at info@optromix.com

Interrogation techniques for FBG Sensor Arrays

FBG sensors are very suitable for sensing and data acquisition, where sensor arrays can be multiplexed using similar techniques that have been applied to fiber-optic sensors like wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), spatial-division-multiplexing (SDM), and time-division-multiplexing (TDM) as they can be directly implemented in the fiber without changing the diameter of the fiber. This feature makes FBG sensors suitable for a wide range of applications.

The main problem with the TDM system is that the sensors must be placed sufficiently far apart because the pulse returning from the adjacent sensors must be able to reach and get detected separately. In WDM systems, different sensors have the nominal central wavelength, and other sensors are separated by a few nanometers. WDM interrogation is available in two topologies i.e., series and parallel. The parallel approach is easier to implement but the series topology allows the optical power from the sensing FBG array to be used much more efficiently than parallel topology.

The number of sensors that you can incorporate within a single fiber depends on the wavelength range of operation of each sensor and the total available wavelength range of the interrogator. Because typical interrogators provide a measurement range of 60 to 80 nm, each fiber Bragg grating array of sensors can usually incorporate anywhere from one to more than 80 sensors – as long as the reflected wavelengths do not overlap in the optical spectrum. Be careful when selecting the nominal wavelengths and ranges for the FBG sensors in an array to ensure that each sensor operates within a unique spectral range.

Major limitations in interrogating FBG sensor arrays are the cross-talk, spectral shadowing, and interference. For all the interrogation approaches, some crosstalk between adjacent sensors seems to be unavoidable. The use of a serial array of FBG sensors with the same central wavelength results in the crosstalk between sensors. The amount of light reflected by the FBG sensors located nearest to the source will affect the amount of the optical power reaching and be returned from gratings further from the source. The lower the peak reflectivity of the FBGs is, the smaller the effect is. Another source of the crosstalk in a TDM serial array of identical FBG sensors arises from multiple reflections between FBGs. This can lead to pulses arriving simultaneously at the detector having undergone a direct reflection from a sensor element and also having experienced a number of multiple reflection paths between FBGs.