A Hybrid Optical Fiber Detector for the Simultaneous Measurement of Dust Concentration and Temperature

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new optical fiber sensor that can measure both dust concentration and temperature at the same time, offering improved safety and accuracy.

Contribution

A hybrid optical fiber detector combining FBG and light extinction for simultaneous dust and temperature measurement.

Findings

The detector achieves dual-parameter sensing with minimal coupling between outputs.

Calibration shows strong exponential relationships between light intensity and dust concentration.

Measurement errors are low when validated against the weighing method.

Abstract

This work presents a hybrid optical fiber detector by combining the sensing mechanism of the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) and the light extinction method to enable the simultaneous measurement of dust concentration and temperature. Compared with the existing dust concentration sensors, the proposed detector offers three key advantages: intrinsic safety, dual-parameter measurement capability, and potentially network-based monitoring. The critical sensing components of the proposed detector consist of two optical collimators and an FBG. Using the extinction effect of light between the two collimators, the dust concentration and temperature are simultaneously determined by monitoring the intensity and the wavelength of the FBG reflectance spectrum, respectively. The measurement feasibility has been evaluated demonstrating that the two parameters of interest can be effectively sensed with minimally coupled outputs of ±3 pm and ±0.1 mW, respectively. Calibration experiments demonstrate that the change in the intensity of light from the FBG is exponentially related to the dust concentration variation with fitting coefficients equal to 0.948, 0.946, and 0.945 for 200 meshes, 300 meshes, and 400 meshes, respectively. The detector’s relative measurement errors were validated against the weighing method, confirming low measurement deviations.

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