New Silica Microspheres Array Sensor

Abstract

In this work a novel optical fiber sensor based on silica microspheres array is proposed. Different sensing heads are presented and compared, differing on the number of microspheres. These structures, ranging from arrays of one to five, are spliced in series. The sensor is subjected to different physical parameters, such as strain, temperature, refractive index and bending. Depending on the number of microspheres the sensitivities to strain and bending are different. The sensor also presents a high sensitivity to temperature of 20.3 pm/degrees C.