Early detection of environmental disruption, unintentional or otherwise, is increasingly desired to ensure hazard minimization in many settings. Here, using a field-portable, smartphone fluorimeter to assess water quality based on the pH response of a designer probe, a map of pH of public tap water sites has been obtained. A custom designed Android application digitally processed and mapped the results utilizing the global positioning system (GPS) service of the smartphone. The map generated indicates no disruption in pH for all sites measured, and all the data are assessed to fall inside the upper limit of local government regulations, consistent with authority reported measurements. This implementation demonstrates a new security concept: network environmental forensics utilizing the potential of novel smartgrid analysis with wireless sensors for the detection of potential disruption to water quality at any point in the city. This concept is applicable across all smartgrid strategies within the next generation of the Internet of Things and can be extended on national and global scales to address a range of target analytes, both chemical and biological.

A conceptual coaxial Pitot tube (PT) has been developed using fiber optic sensors combined with actuators to monitor and maintain its correct operation under different environmental conditions. Experiments were performed showing that the dynamic and static tubes can be cleared of ice. It was also demonstrated that the dynamic tube could be cleared of dust and sand which was not the case for the static tube in the coaxial configuration. An approach was proposed to overcome this problem involving a conventional configuration where the static tube was operated independently orthogonal to the dynamic tube, and a second set of sensors and actuators was used. Sensors and associated actuators were developed for temperature and intensity for a linear PT. The aim of this work is to propose a solution for a problem that has caused the loss of the lives of many passengers and crew of aircraft. Resources were not available to test a full implementation of a PT incorporating the proposed modifications.

We present a comparison of different techniques for the analysis of the shift and tilt in optical interference fringes. Fringe center, Radon transform, and Gaussian approximation methods are used for fringe analysis. We have measured the tilt and shift between two relevant fringe patterns. The error in tilt measurement was about 2%, and the displacement of the order of few nanometers was measured by the fringe shift analysis. The comparison between the techniques is analyzed with respect to percentage error.

This paper proposes the design and characterization of microstructure optical fiber for gas sensing applications. The aim is to detect toxic and colorless gases over a wide transmission band covering 0.80 μm to 2.00 μm wavelength. Numerical investigation is carried out by using the finite element method (FEM). The numerical study shows that sensitivity of the proposed sensor is moderately increased by introducing four non-circular holes around the defected core of photonic crystal fiber and the confinement loss is also reduced. Furthermore, we confirm that increasing the diameter of central air core and size of the non-circular holes can improve the relative sensitivity and the confinement loss is reduced by increasing the diameter of air holes in the cladding. The enhancement of the relative sensitivity is more than 27.58% (0.1323 to 0.1688) at the wavelength λ=1.33μm that is the absorption line of methane (CH4) and hydrogen fluoride (HF) gases. The confinement loss of the fiber is 1.765×10-8 dB/m.

A fiber Bragg grating (FBG) pressure sensor with high sensitivity and resolution has been designed and demonstrated. The sensor is configured by firmly fixing the FBG with a metal bellows structure. The sensor works by means of measuring the Bragg wavelength shift of the FBG with respect to pressure change. From the experimental results, the pressure sensitivity of the sensor is found to be 90.6 pm/psi, which is approximately 4000 times as that of a bare fiber Bragg grating. A very good linearity of 99.86% is observed between the Bragg wavelength of the FBG and applied pressure. The designed sensor shows good repeatability with a negligible hysteresis error of ± 0.29 psi. A low-cost interrogation system that includes a long period grating (LPG) and a photodiode (PD) accompanied with simple electronic circuitry is demonstrated for the FBG sensor, which enables the sensor to attain high resolution of up to 0.025 psi. Thermal-strain cross sensitivity of the FBG pressure sensor is compensated using a reference FBG temperature sensor. The designed sensor can be used for liquid level, specific gravity, and static/dynamic low pressure measurement applications.

In this paper, we present and discuss a path to extend the enhancement of the resolution of an optical surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor. Basically, our approach is to combine bi-metamaterial layers to design the SPR sensor. The calculation shows that the proposed SPR sensor structure has a preference over the conventional SPR sensors and bimetallic SPR sensors since it gives a much sharper reflectance dip and can achieve considerable sensitivity improvement when compared to the recently reported investigations. The effects of the metamaterial permittivity, permeability, and thickness on the reflectance curve are studied. It is also seen that metamaterial layers improve the field of the proposed SPR structure, which may provide a novel tool to significantly enhance the sensitivity and resolution of the sensors.

Two promising post-treatment techniques, i.e. applying tensile strain and rising temperature, are demonstrated to enhance the mode-coupling efficiency of the CO2-laser-induced long period fiber gratings (LPFGs) with periodic grooves. Such two post-treatment techniques can be used to enhance the resonant attenuation of the grating to achieve a LPFG-based filter with an extremely large attenuation and to tailor the transmission spectrum of the CO2-laser-induced LPFG after grating fabrication.

A long-range phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry is proposed and experimentally demonstrated, based on the gated Raman amplification (RA). This technique can reduce the amplified spontaneous emissions (ASE) noise of the Raman pump while extend the sensing distance. A direct-detection based phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) with an operation range of 50 km and a spatial resolution of 20 m has been demonstrated. The influence of different delay time of the gated Raman pump on the Φ-OTDR system is also discussed.

An optical fiber displacement sensor with a large measuring range for simultaneous displacement and temperature measurement is presented in this paper. We developed a specific transducer based on the piston and hydraumatic structure to realize a large displacement measurement, which combined the large measuring range and high precision into a single sensor system. The spectrum showed two reflection peaks used to compensate for cross-sensitivity in the displacement detection. This displacement sensor can linearly work in a large measuring displacement range greater than 45 mm with a high sensitivity of 0.036 nm/mm. The sensor we reported can be developed for real-time displacement monitoring in many industrial environments such as the mechanical shape or liquid level monitoring.

This paper proposes an impact localization system based on the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) array and minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamforming algorithm. The linear FBG array, which contains seven FBG sensors, is used for detecting impact signals. Morlet wavelet transform is applied for extracting narrow-band signals of impact signals. According to the MVDR beamforming algorithm, the system realizes single-impact and multi-impact localizations. The localization system is verified on a 500 mm×500 mm×2 mm carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) plate for single-impact and multi-impact localizations. The average locating error and the maximum locating error are 6.8 mm and 9.9 mm, respectively.

A real-time intelligent fiber-optic perimeter intrusion detection system (PIDS) based on the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor network is presented in this paper. To distinguish the effects of different intrusion events, a novel real-time behavior impact classification method is proposed based on the essential statistical characteristics of signal’s profile in the time domain. The features are extracted by the principal component analysis (PCA), which are then used to identify the event with a K-nearest neighbor classifier. Simulation and field tests are both carried out to validate its effectiveness. The average identification rate (IR) for five sample signals in the simulation test is as high as 96.67%, and the recognition rate for eight typical signals in the field test can also be achieved up to 96.52%, which includes both the fence-mounted and the ground-buried sensing signals. Besides, critically high detection rate (DR) and low false alarm rate (FAR) can be simultaneously obtained based on the autocorrelation characteristics analysis and a hierarchical detection and identification flow.

A simple and compact optical fiber directional bending vector sensor with simultaneous measurement of temperature based on the Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The device consists of a piece of photonic crystal fiber (PCF) sandwiched between two single mode fibers (SMFs) with a lateral offset splicing. It shows the capacity for recognizing positive and negative directions. Within a curvature range of ?7.13 m-1 to 7.13 m-1, the bending sensitivities of two resonant dips with opposite fiber orientations are obtained to be 0.484 nm/m-1 and 0.246 nm/m-1, respectively. This simple MZI is formed by invoking interference between LP01 and LP21 core modes, which leads to that the sensor is not sensitive to ambient refractive index (ARI). The temperature sensitivity has also been investigated. Two dips have obviously different sensitivities on the temperature and bending, so two parameters of both curvature and temperature can be distinguished and measured simultaneously by constructing a matrix and using one simple model interferometer.