Recent advances in fiber-grating sensors for utility industry applications

Considerable interest has been shown in the use of fiber gratings as multiplexed sensor elements for civil and aerospace structures and for underwater acoustics. Fiber gratings can also act as transducer elements for many generic sensor types such as temperature, strain, pressure, and E-field for electric utility power plant applications. Properly annealed grating sensors can be used under load conditions to temperatures of 400 degree(s)C with no significant loss in reflectivity or wavelength changes over long periods of time. New fiber grating sensor demodulation schemes also look attractive for decoding the sensor's wavelength encoded output. There are also new developments using fiber gratings in short cavity fiber lasers for ultra high sensitivity sensors.