Sapphire Fiber Based Sensing Technologies for High Temperature Applications

Sapphire fiber has been studied intensively for harsh environment sensing in the past two decades due to its supreme mechanical, physical and optical properties. It is by far the most reported and likely the best optical fiber based sensing technology for sensing applications in temperature beyond 1000°C. Several sensing schemes have been proposed and studied to date including sapphire fiber extrinsic and intrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometers, fiber Bragg gratings and long period gratings inscribed in sapphire fibers. Lacking the cladding, sapphire fiber is highly multi-moded which renders sapphire fiber based sensor fabrication much more difficult than those based on silica fibers. Among all the reported work on sapphire fiber sensing, the vast majority is for single point temperature measurement. In this work, different sensing schemes are proposed to enhance the capability of the sapphire fiber based sensing technology. For the single point sensing, a miniaturized sapphire fiber temperature sensor for embedded sensing applications was proposed and studied. The sensors are no more than 75 µm in diameter and are ideal for non-invasive embedded sensing applications. Unlike existing sapphire fiber sensors, the thin film sensors are batch-fabrication oriented and thus have a potential to permit mass production with low cost. In addition to single point sensors, multiplexed sapphire fiber sensing systems are investigated for the first time. Two multiplexed sensing solutions, named frequency-multiplexing and spatial-multiplexing, are proposed and studied to achieve multiplexed sensing based on sapphire fibers.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Wang, Jiajun

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Wang, Anbo

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Xu, Yong
• Poon, Ting-Chung
• Pickrell, Gary R.
• Guido, Louis J.

• multiplexed
• harsh environment
• high temperature
• sensing
• sapphire fiber
• miniaturized
• thin film
• wafer

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Dc Identifier Other

etd-01182011-140606

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/77149