Fiber-Optic Sensor for Identifying Liquids and Determining Solutions Concentration

Abstract

Fiber-optic sensors for identifying liquids and determining the concentration of solutions have been studied with the possibility of using various types of single-mode optical fibers produced by industry and widely used in optical cables and telecommunications to create sensors for identifying liquids and determining the concentration of solutions. To identify liquids with different refractive indices and determine the concentration of substances dissolved in water, the peak value of the reflectograms of the optical fiber located at the interface between the optical fiber core and the environment can be used as an information parameter. The value of the information parameter depends on the refractive index of the liquid in which one end of the optical fiber is located. The parameters of fiber-optic sensors for identifying liquids and determining the concentration of solutions were studied by optical reflectometry in different wavelength ranges of optical radiation with a duration of reflectometer probe pulses from 25 to 300 ns. It has been established that the fiber-optic sensor can operate at any wavelength of optical radiation corresponding to the transparency windows of the optical loss spectrum of the optical fiber. The influence of the length of the optical fiber between the recording device and the place where the concentration of a liquid solution is determined using a fiber-optic sensor was studied. The possibility of creating a fiber-optic sensor for determining the concentration of the liquid solutions based on optical fibers has been demonstrated.

Keywords

• optical fiber
• sensor
• reflection coefficient
• refractive index
• reflectometer
• solution concentration