Gary A. Ball

Applications of fiber grating sensors

With successful long term reliability testing completed, fiber gratings are emerging from the laboratory to find use in communications, signal processing, and sensor systems. For sensor applications fiber gratings can act as generic transducer elements to sense many different measurands. Important emerging applications areas are for civil and embedded composite structure sensors and acoustic array sensors. Strength, reliability, and temperature limitations of fiber gratings are important issues in real world industrial applications. Also important for wide acceptance of fiber gratings is their manufacturability. In-line systems are currently being set up that will make low cost fiber gratings a near term reality. Although driven by communications markets, high volume manufacture of low cost, reliable fiber gratings will be important for their expanded use in sensor applications.