A Miniature Liquid Flowmeter Using All-Fiber Fabry–Perot Cavity for Real-Time Measurement
Haotian Ding,
Dongqin Lu,
Xiangxu Kong,
Junxian Luo,
Hanwen Liu,
Hongwei Tong,
Ye Chen,
Fei Xu
Affiliations
Haotian Ding
College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Dongqin Lu
College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Xiangxu Kong
College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Junxian Luo
School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Hanwen Liu
College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Hongwei Tong
College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Ye Chen
MIIT Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Materials and Physics, State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control for Aerospace Structures, College of Physics, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 211106, China
Fei Xu
College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
A miniature and highly sensitive fiber-optic liquid flowmeter based on Fabry–Perot interferometry (FPI) is proposed and demonstrated for fluid-flow micro-channel testing. The diaphragm deformation and pressure of the proposed sensor for flow rate detection are obtained from numerical and finite element method simulations of the theoretical model. The FPI flowmeter can be applied in real time to measure the ultra-wide dynamic range from 0 mL/min to 90 mL/min, with a response time of hundreds of milliseconds, controlling the flow rate with a resolution of 1.08 mL/min, which is 1.2% of the full scale. The quadratic functional relation between dip wavelength shifts and flow rates is verified by the flow calibration curves of the FPI flowmeter under dynamic pressure conditions. In addition, the effective temperature compensation is realized by connecting an FBG temperature sensor for variable temperature flow detection, and the measured error is reduced by nearly 25-times. The proposed sensor has the potential to measure the liquid flow rate in various applications.
