Development of a Highly Integrated Multifunctional Optical Sensor for Monitoring Weapons Health and Battlefield Environments

There exists a need for highly integrated, multifunctional optical sensors for in situ monitoring of weapons health and microbial/chemical environments. These highly integrated optical sensors should yield a sensor with better sensing capability (such as sensing multiple parameters simultaneously) and sensitivity, lower cost, lighter weight, higher robustness, and smaller size that current conventional individual electronic and mechanical sensors. The objective of this work is to develop such an integrated optical sensor that can make use of three general types of sensing methods including optical sensing of reactive materials for chemical sensing, physical displacement sensing for sensing physical parameter such as pressure and vibration, and immunoassay based sensing for detecting the presence of biological/chemical/explosive compounds. The novel optical sensor design outlined in this proposal will support the simultaneous integration of all three of these sensing methods, ultimately resulting in highly integrated multisensors capable of sensing a wide range or parameters, environments, and conditions. This sensor design is well suited to existing manufacturing and microelectronics packaging techniques and is expected to be cost effective and highly manufacturable.