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"The NI optical sensor interrogator unifies fiber optic sensing and electrical measurement systems, which are traditionally kept separate. You can now take a true sensor fusion approach by easily adapting one high-performance modular system to solve a wide range of structural health monitoring applications." - Professor Alfredo Cigada, Politecnico di Milano |
Electrical sensors have for decades been the standard mechanism for measuring physical and mechanical phenomena. Despite their ubiquity, these sensors have limitations that make them unsafe, impractical, or unusable in many applications. Optical sensing based on fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) overcomes many of these challenges by using light rather than electricity and standard optical fiber in place of copper wire. Optical fibers are nonconductive, electrically passive, immune to electromagnetic interference (EMI)-induced noise, and able to transmit data over long distances with little or no loss in signal integrity. In addition, you can daisy chain multiple FBG sensors along a single optical fiber to greatly reduce the size, weight, and complexity of measurement systems.
