Novel Fiber Optic Sensor Probe with a Pair of Highly Reflected Connectors and a Vessel of Water Absorption Material for Water Leak Detection

Sensors

Tae-Sik Cho¹  Ki-Sun Choi¹  Dae-Cheol Seo¹  Il-Bum Kwon¹ 

[1] Center for Safety Measurement, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science, 1 Doryong-dong Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 305-340, Korea; E-Mails:

关键词: water leak detection;    highly reflected connector;    reference connector;    sensing connector;    sensor probe;    water combination soil;    vessel;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s120810906

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The use of a fiber optic quasi-distributed sensing technique for detecting the location and severity of water leakage is suggested. A novel fiber optic sensor probe is devised with a vessel of water absorption material called as water combination soil (WCS) located between two highly reflected connectors: one is a reference connector and the other is a sensing connector. In this study, the sensing output is calculated from the reflected light signals of the two connectors. The first reflected light signal is a reference and the second is a sensing signal which is attenuated by the optical fiber bending loss due to the WCS expansion absorbing water. Also, the bending loss of each sensor probe is determined by referring to the total number of sensor probes and the total power budget of an entire system. We have investigated several probe characteristics to show the design feasibility of the novel fiber sensor probe. The effects of vessel sizes of the probes on the water detection sensitivity are studied. The largest vessel probe provides the highest sensitivity of 0.267 dB/mL, while the smallest shows relatively low sensitivity of 0.067 dB/mL, and unstable response. The sensor probe with a high output value provides a high sensitivity with various detection levels while the number of total installable sensor probes decreases.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.