Realization and characterization of fiber optic reflective sensor

In almost all of non-invasive techniques, fiber optic sensors may be the most promising ones because of their inherent advantages such as very small size and hard environment tolerance. Proximity sensors based on optical fiber are highly required especially in the impact area of electromagnetic fields. In this paper three different types of fiber optic reflective sensors are presented. In all three types of the sensor four multimode optical fibers (MMF) illuminate the movable surface. The difference is in the number of collecting the reflected light MMF. In the first one, 12 MMF collect the light, in the second one 20 MMF, while in the third one the number of MMF collecting reflected light is 32. Moreover, all three types of fiber optic reflective sensors were realized in two configurations. In the first one, the cleaved MMF were used to collect reflected light, while in the second configuration – the ball-lensed optical fibers were chosen. In this paper an analysis of each type of realized sensor is presented. In the last part of this paper the obtained results and the detailed discussion are given.