Sensing properties of optical fiber sensor to ultrasonic guided waves

Optical fiber sensors have been proven that they have the potential to detect high-frequency ultrasonic signals, in structural health monitoring field which generally refers to acoustic emission signals from active structural damages and guided waves excited by ultrasonic actuators and propagating in waveguide. In this work, the sensing properties of optical fiber sensors based on Mach-Zehnder interferometer were investigated in the metal plate. Analytical formulas were conducted first to explore the parameters affecting its sensing performances. Due to the simple and definable frequency component, the Lamb wave excited by the piezoelectric wafer was employed to study the sensitivity of the proposed optical fiber sensors with respect to the frequency, rather than the acoustic emission signals. In the experiments, according to above investigations, spiral shape optical fiber sensors with different size were selected to increase their sensitivity. Lamb waves were excited by a circular piezoelectric wafer, while another piezoelectric wafer was used to compare their voltage responses. Furthermore, by changing the excitation frequency, the tuning frequency characteristic of the proposed optical fiber sensor was also investigated experimentally.