Silica Optical Fiber Sensors Production Methods

The concept of OFS is not new and has been around since the 1960s, but OFS has made the big leap to practical implementation, only thanks to the advances in modern low-loss optical fibers, although some trails using low-loss optical fibers were shown in 1970s [1, 2]. The field of OFS owes its advancement to the progress achieved in the general field of optical fiber and optoelectronic instrumentation. Specifically, the advancement in the field of optical fiber communication systems—such as viable key components: light sources and photo detectors—has helped bringing the costs of OFS systems significantly down. The low cost of sensors is one of the main drivers for the interest in the concept of optical fiber sensing and will be a key issue in the argument of adopting OFS in the concept of IoT, with a wide range of applications [3–5]. Having introduced the concept of optical fiber sensing and the different types of available optical sensing techniques (i.e. modulation/demodulation) in the previous chapter, this chapter moves to the details of the different production methods of Silica OFSs.