Fiber-Optic Thermal Sensor for TiN Film Crack Monitoring

Materials (Basel). 2017 Nov 11;10(11):1297. doi: 10.3390/ma10111297.

Abstract

The study focuses on the thermal and temperature sensitivity behavior of an optical fiber sensor device. In this article, a titanium nitride (TiN)-coated fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor fabricated using an ion beam sputtering system was investigated. The reflection spectra of the FBG sensor were tested using R-soft optical software to simulate the refractive index sensitivity. In these experiments, the temperature sensitivity of the TiN FBG was measured at temperatures ranging from 100 to 500 °C using an optical spectrum analyzer (OSA). The results showed that the temperature sensitivity of the proposed TiN FBG sensor reached 12.8 pm/°C for the temperature range of 100 to 300 °C and 20.8 pm/°C for the temperature range of 300 to 500 °C. Additionally, we found that the produced oxidation at temperatures of 400-500 °C caused a crack, with the crack becoming more and more obvious at higher and higher temperatures.

Keywords: TiN-coated FBG sensor; fiber Bragg grating (FBG); refractive index sensitivity; temperature sensitivity.