Fiber-Optic Sensors: Meeting the Challenges of Today’s Industrial Applications

Fiber-optic sensors (FOS) have been developed extensively over more than four decades. They have been refined to address a range of challenging industrial applications—usually where conventional sensors often are badly conditioned and do not fit well, especially for ‘niche’ sensing needs. FOS systems can enhance safety; allow assets to be used for longer and schedule repair and maintenance to be scheduled more efficiently; and create more cost-effective and improved working conditions where they are deployed. Global challenges have produced many interesting opportunities for new sensor systems.

Focusing on a series of FOS case studies, Kenneth Grattan reviews essential background on fiber-optic sensors and explains how a range of FOS-based techniques can be applied to topical problems, offering alternative and improved systems over current technologies—be they electronic, hydraulic, electrochemical, and analogue or digital—and revealing solutions which have the potential to be readily adopted by industry.

About the presenter
Kenneth T. V. Grattan, Ph.D., studied physics at Queen’s University Belfast in Ireland, then pursued his doctorate in laser physics focusing on laser pulse-probe techniques. He became a Research Fellow at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, working on advanced photolytic drivers for novel laser systems. Following that, he joined City University London (CUL) and was subsequently appointed professor of measurement and instrumentation and head of the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering. His research interests have expanded to include the use of fiber-optics and optical systems in the measurement of a range of physical and chemical parameters for industrial applications.

In 2000, he was elected president of the Institute of Measurement and Control and was awarded the Calendar Medal and the Honeywell Prize of the Institute of Measurement and Control. He has served as Dean of the School of Engineering & Mathematical Sciences and the School of Informatics at CUL. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2008 and holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Scientific Instrumentation. Grattan is the author of over seven hundred publications in major international journals and a similar number at key conferences worldwide. He is also co-editor of a five-volume topical series on FOS technology.