A spectroscopic study on laser-produced tin plasma utilizing the optical emission spectroscopy (OES) technique is presented. Plasma is produced from a solid tin target irradiated with pulsed laser in room environment. Electron temperature is determined at different laser peak powers from the ratio of line intensities, while electron density is deduced from Saha-Boltzmann equation. A limited number of suitable tin lines are detected, and the effect of the laser peak power on the intensity of emission lines is discussed. Electron temperatures are measured in the range of 0.36 eV–0.44 eV with electron densities of the order 1017 cm–3 as the laser peak power is varied from 11 MW to 22 MW.

High sensitivity of a distributed optical-fiber vibration sensing (DOVS) system based on the phase-sensitivity optical time domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) technology also brings in high nuisance alarm rates (NARs) in real applications. In this paper, feature extraction methods of wavelet decomposition (WD) and wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) are comparatively studied for three typical field testing signals, and an artificial neural network (ANN) is built for the event identification. The comparison results prove that the WPD performs a little better than the WD for the DOVS signal analysis and identification in oil pipeline safety monitoring. The identification rate can be improved up to 94.4%, and the nuisance alarm rate can be effectively controlled as low as 5.6% for the identification network with the wavelet packet energy distribution features.

In the present paper, we study the transmission of the two-dimensional photonic crystal (PC) superellipse ring resonator. The fast growing applications of optomechanical systems lead to strong demands in new sensing mechanism in order to design the sensing elements to nanometer scale. The photonic crystal based resonator has been investigated as promising solutions because the band gap structure and resonator characteristics are extremely sensitive to the deformation and position shift of rod / cavity in PC resonators. This structure opens a single channel filter. The study is extended for tuning of channel filter’s wavelength with a temperature of this structure. The transmission of the channel filter shows a red shift with temperature linearly. This wavelength shift of the channel filter is used for the sensor application. The sensitivity for the proposed structure is found to be 65.3 pm/℃. The outstanding sensing capability renders PC resonators as a promising optomechanical sensing element to be integrated into various transducers for temperature sensing applications.

A method for detecting protein molecules based on the tilted fiber Bragg grating (TFBG) surface plasma resonance (SPR) is proposed to achieve the quick online real-time detection of trace amount of proteins. The detection principles of the TFBG-SPR protein molecular probe are analyzed, and its feasibility is demonstrated. The intermediary material between the protein molecules and the golden layer outside of the fiber gratings is cysteamine hydrochloride. When the concentration of the cysteamine hydrochloride solution is 2 M, the shift of the TFBG resonance peak is 2.23 nm, illustrating that the cysteamine hydrochloride modifies the gold film successfully. IgG antigen solution is poured on the surface of the cysteamine hydrochloride modifying the gold-deposited TFBG. Finally, antigen-antibody hybridization experiment is carried out with a 10 mg/mL antibody solution, and after two hours of hybridization the resonance peak of the TFBG shifts 5.1 nm, which validates the feasibility and effectiveness of the TFBG-SPR protein molecular probe.

A short cavity distributed feedback (DFB) fiber laser is used for low frequency acoustic signal detection. Three DFB fiber lasers with different central wavelengths are chained together to make three-element vector hydrophone with proper sensitivity enhancement design, which has extensive and significant applications to underwater acoustic monitoring for the national defense, oil, gas exploration, and so on. By wavelength-phase demodulation, the lasing wavelength changes under different frequency signals can be interpreted, and the sensitivity is tested about 33 dB re pm/g. The frequency response range is rather flat from 5 Hz to 300 Hz.sensitivity

We have numerically analyzed the thermal effects in Nd: YLF laser rod. The calculations of temperature and stress distributions in the Nd: YLF laser rod were performed with finite element (FE) simulations. The calculations showed that the laser rod could be pumped up to a power of 40 W without fracture caused by thermal stress. The calculated thermal lens power of thermally induced lens in Nd: YLF (σ-polarization) laser rod was analyzed and validated experimentally with two independent techniques. A Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor and a Mach-Zehnder interferometer were used for direct measurements of focal thermal lens at different pump powers. The obtained measurements were coinciding with the FE simulations.

An in-line fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) based on the hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HCPCF) for refractive index (RI) measurement is proposed in this paper. The FPI is formed by splicing both ends of a short section of the HCPCF to single mode fibers (SMFs) and cleaving the SMF pigtail to a proper length. The RI response of the sensor is analyzed theoretically and demonstrated experimentally. The results show that the FPI sensor has linear response to external RI and good repeatability. The sensitivity calculated from the maximum fringe contrast is –136 dB/RIU. A new spectrum differential integration (SDI) method for signal processing is also presented in this study. In this method, the RI is obtained from the integrated intensity of the absolute difference between the interference spectrum and its smoothed spectrum. The results show that the sensitivity obtained from the integrated intensity is about –1.34×105 dB/RIU. Compared with the maximum fringe contrast method, the new SDI method can provide the higher sensitivity, better linearity, improved reliability, and accuracy, and it’s also convenient for automatic and fast signal processing in real-time monitoring of RI.

Fiber grating is a kind of new type of fiber optic light source device which has been rapidly changing in the refractive index of the core in recent years. Especially, it can realize the high precision of the external parameters by means of the special structure design and the encapsulation technology [1, 2]. In this paper, a fiber grating vibration sensor which is suitable for vibration monitoring in key areas is designed based on the technical background of vibration monitoring system. The sensor uses a single beam structure and pastes the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) to measure the vibration wavelength on the surface. When the vibration is simply harmonic vibration, the Bragg reflection wavelength will change periodically, and the periodic variation of the wavelength curve can be measured by the fiber grating demodulator, then the correctness of the experimental results is verified. In this paper, through the analysis of the data measured by the demodulator, the MATLAB software is used to verify the data, and the different frequency domains, the modes, and the phase frequency curves are obtained. The measurement range is 0 Hz – 100 Hz, and the natural frequency is 90.6 Hz.

There may be more than 2% strain of carbon fiber composite material on solid rocket motor (SRM) in some extreme cases. A surface-bonded silica fiber Bragg grating (FBG) strain sensor coated by polymer is designed to detect the large strain of composite material. The strain transfer relation of the FBG large strain sensor is deduced, and the strain transfer mechanism is verified by finite element simulation. To calibrate the sensors, the tensile test is done by using the carbon fiber composite plate specimen attached to the designed strain sensor. The results show that the designed sensor can detect the strain more than 3%, the strain sensitivity is 0.0762 pm/με, the resolution is 13.13με, and the fitting degree of the wavelength-strain curve fitting function is 0.9988. The accuracy and linearity of the sensor can meet the engineering requirements.

We propose a new kind of microring resonators (MRR) based on 4 × 4 multimode interference (MMI) couplers for multichannel and highly sensitive chemical and biological sensors. The proposed sensor structure has advantages of compactness and high sensitivity compared with the reported sensing structures. By using the transfer matrix method (TMM) and numerical simulations, the designs of the sensor based on silicon waveguides are optimized and demonstrated in detail. We apply our structure to detect glucose and ethanol concentrations simultaneously. A high sensitivity of 9000 nm/RIU, detection limit of 2 × 10-4 for glucose sensing and sensitivity of 6000 nm/RIU, detection limit of 1.3 × 10-5 for ethanol sensing are achieved.

Based on the principle of the fiber Bragg grating, a new type of fiber-optic pressure sensor for axial force measurement of transformer winding is designed, which is designed with the structure of bending plate beam, the optimization of the packaging process, and material of the sensor. Through the calibration experiment to calibrate the sensor, the field test results of the Taikai transformer factory show that the sensitivity of the sensor is 0.133 pm/kPa and the repeatability error is 2.7% FS. The data of the fiber-optic pressure sensor in different positions maintain consistent and repeatable, which can meet the requirement of the real-time monitoring of the axial force of transformer winding.

We fabricated a simple, compact, and stable temperature sensor based on an S-shaped dislocated optical fiber. The dislocation optical fiber has two splice points, and we obtained the optimal parameters based on the theory and our experiment, such as the dislocation amount and length of the dislocation optical fiber. According to the relationship between the temperature and the peak wavelength shift, the temperature of the environment can be obtained. Then, we made this fiber a micro bending as S-shape between the two dislocation points, and the S-shaped micro bending part could release stress with the change in temperature and reduce the effect of stress on the temperature measurement. This structure could solve the problem of sensor distortion caused by the cross response of temperature and stress. We measured the S-shaped dislocation fiber sensor and the dislocation fiber without S-shape under the same environment and conditions, and the S-shaped dislocation fiber had the advantages of the stable reliability and good linearity.

Sensitivities of three-layer and four-layer planar waveguide sensors having metamaterial as guiding layer are analyzed for p-polarization of incident light and compared with existing results. Proposed sensors show improved cover layer sensitivity for each case of the cover layer refractive index. Also, proposed sensors demonstrate improved adlayer sensitivity for different values of adlayer thickness and adlayer refractive indices. It is observed that metamaterial has increased the evanescent field due to the unconventional nature of it, by which values of cover layer sensitivity as well as adlayer sensitivity are enhanced.

This paper reports the state of art in a variety of pressure and the detailed study of various matrix based pressure sensors. The performances of the bridges, buildings, etc. are threatened by earthquakes, material degradations, and other environmental effects. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is crucial to protect the people and also for assets planning. This study is a contribution in developing the knowledge about self-sensing smart materials and structures for the construction industry. It deals with the study of self-sensing as well as mechanical and electrical properties of different matrices based on pressure sensors. The relationships among the compression, tensile strain, and crack length with electrical resistance change are also reviewed.