Fiber in-line magnetic field sensor based on Mach-Zehnder interferometer integrated with magnetic fluid

In this paper, magnetic fluid (MF), a new type of optical functional nanomaterial with interesting optical characteristics under the external magnetic field, is adopted to form a novel fiber-optic magnetic field sensor. The proposed sensor is based on Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and has a multimode-singlemode-multimode (MSM) fiber structure. The MSM structure was fabricated by splicing a section of uncoated single mode fiber (SMF) between two short sections of multimode fibers (MMFs) using a fiber fusion splicer. The magnetic field sensing probe was made by inserting the fiber-optic structure in an MF-filled capillary tube. Variations in an external magnetic field is seen to cause changes in the refractive index of MF. This tunable change in the refractive index with magnetic field strengths between 0.6 mT to 21.4 mT produces a shift in the peak position of the wavelength. The shift of the valley wavelength with magnetic field intensity has a good linearity of up to 99.6%. The achieved sensitivity of the proposed magnetic field sensor is 0.123 nm/mT,which is improved by several folds compared with those of most of the other reported MF-based magnetic field sensors. Furthermore, we build the corresponding circuit-based measurement system, and the experimental results show that the voltage change indirectly reflects the change of the external magnetic field strength. Therefore, this provides the potential to fiber-based magnetic field sensing applications.     

一种新型的液晶填充SM-NC-SM结构光纤温度传感器

基于向列相液晶(NLC)和多模干涉原理,提出了 一种新型的全光纤温度传感器。在两段普通单模光纤(SMF)中 间熔接一段直径为200μm、长约为10cm的无 心光纤(NCF),之后将其插入充满液晶的毛细管中并用胶棒密封,实现 液晶封装的SM-NC-SM结构的制作。其中,液晶可视为NCF的包层,基于NLC的温度 -折射率可调性和热光系数大的特性,能通过SM-NC-SM结构传播的光 受到温度调制,通过检测特征波长的漂移实现外环境温度测量。实验测得在27~67℃温度范围内的灵敏度高达626.6pm/℃, 并得到特征波长漂移与温度良好的线性关系,其线性度为99.23%。利 用设计的传感器搭建了实 用的光电检测系统,将波长漂移量的检测转换成电压大小的测量,测得相对误差小于4%。 本文设计的传感器结构简单、成本低和 灵敏度高,为温度传感应用提供了一种新方法。