Non-Metallic, Thin-Film, Miniature Fiber-Optic Temperature Sensors for Small Scale Explosives Characterization

For explosives characterization, fiber optic sensors offer many advantages over equivalent electrical sensors: extreme thermal capability, immunity to electro-magnetic interference and grounding issues, ability to transmit data kilometers with minutesignal degradation (less than 0.5dB/km), and only one connection per sensor. Luna Innovations proposes to research and develop technology to improve the performance of the Luna Innovations miniature fiber-optic temperature sensor for this application.The Luna sensor has already proven to be capable of measuring 400¿C temperature changes in 2 milliseconds before being destroyed at 800¿C, and has a theoretical response of less than 1 millisecond. The team members will apply linear and 2nd orderalgorithms developed from models of the transducer to remove the thermal inertia from the data. In addition, the team will define the manufacturing processes, materials, and configuration of the Luna sensor to achieve the design goals of 4000¿C and 1millisecond rise times. The Phase I R&D effort will concentrate on extensive modeling of the existing transducer as well as investigation of processes and materials to improve the sensor and instrumentation capabilities. Phase II will continue thedevelopment of the most promising technology(ies) to achieve the design goals. Thermal measurement is a vast market with a myriad of environments. Thermocouples are by far the most prevalent technology for thermal measurement but are also limited inapplication environment. Thermocouples cannot typically be utilized in reacting, corrosive, or electrically noisy environments above 1800¿C. Miniature, inert, intrinsically safe, EMI proof, remote temperature sensors rugged enough for explosions wouldopen the remaining markets not currently available to thermocouples such as gas turbine engine combustor monitoring, rocket engine combustion monitoring, and chemical process monitoring. Luna sees this technology rapidly taking the fringe markets ofthermal measurement as well as those in heat flux measurements.