A testbed simulating an intensity-modulated fiber optic displacement sensor is experimentally characterized, and the implications regarding sensor design are discussed. Of interest are the intensity distribution of the transmitted optical signal and the relationships between sensor architecture and performance. Particularly, an intensity-modulated sensor's sensitivity, linearity, displacement range, and resolution are functions of the relative positioning of its transmitting and receiving fibers. In this paper, sensor architectures with various combinations of these performance metrics are discussed. A sensor capable of micrometer resolution is reported, and it is concluded that this work could lead to an improved methodology for sensor design. This paper has been approved by Los Alamos National Laboratory for unlimited public distribution (LA-UR 10-06637).
[1]
J. A. Buck,et al.
Fundamentals of optical fibers
,
1995
.
[2]
Yan Bo.
Micro-air-gap Based Intrinsic Fabry-Perot Interferometric Fiber-optic Sensor
,
2011
.
[4]
R O Claus,et al.
Quadrature phase-shifted, extrinsic Fabry-Perot optical fiber sensors.
,
1991,
Optics letters.
[5]
Yves St-Amant,et al.
One-dimensional single-mode fiber-optic displacement sensors for submillimeter measurements.
,
2009,
Applied optics.
[6]
Haiying Huang,et al.
Simulation, implementation, and analysis of an optical fiber bundle distance sensor with single mode illumination.
,
2008,
Applied optics.
[7]
R O Cook,et al.
Fiber optic lever displacement transducer.
,
1979,
Applied optics.