Industrial applications of fiber optic sensing

Thanks to the growth of the fiber optics telecommunication industry, fiber optic components have become less expensive, more reliable and well known by potential fiber optic sensor users. LEDs, optical fibers, couplers and connectors are now widely distributed and are the building blocks for the fiber optic sensor manufacturer. Additionally, the huge demand in consumer electronics of the past 10 years has provided the manufacturer with cheap and powerful programmable logic components which reduce the development time as well as the cost of the associated instrumentation. This market trend has allowed Photonetics to develop, manufacture and sell fiber optic sensors for the last 10 years. The company contribution in the fields of fiber optic gyros (4 licenses sold world wide), white light interferometry and fiber optic sensor networks is widely recognized. Moreover, its 1992 acquisition of some of the assets of Metricor Inc., greatly reinforced its position and allowed it to pursue new markets. Over the past four years, Photonetics has done an important marketing effort to better understand the need of its customers. The result of this research has fed R&D efforts towards a new generation instrument, the Metricor 2000, better adapted to the expectations of fiber optic sensors users, thanks to its unique features: (1) universality -- the system can accept more than 20 different sensors (T, P, RI, . . .). (2) scalability -- depending on the customer needs, the system can be used with 1 to 64 sensors. (3) performance -- because of its improved design, overall accuracies of 0.01% FS can be reached. (4) versatility -- its modular design enables a fast and easy custom design for specific applications. This paper presents briefly the Metricor 2000 and its family of FO probes. Then, it describes two fiber optic sensing (FOS) applications/markets where FOS have proven to be very useful.