A new fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor that can measure temperature, vibration, and strain is proposed in this article. The structure of this sensor is designed and optimized via theoretical analysis and the finite-element method (FEM). With an innovatively designed L-shaped cantilever (LSC), this designed sensor can better balance the vibration measurement sensitivity and the resonant frequency. The strain measurement structure is designed as a hollow square so that the reaction force of the sensor for the measured object is only 2.76×10 ^-3 N/ με, which ensures that the strain distribution of the measured object is not affected. The designed sensor can significantly amplify the measured strain with a measurement sensitivity (5.44 pm/ με) that is four times greater than that of the bare FBGs. This article uses single-mode FBGs inscribed by a femtosecond laser (FS-FBG) to make the sensors, and the sensing performance is analyzed. The results show that this FS-FBG-based sensor can withstand temperatures up to 1100 °C.

A compact vector magnetometer based on balloon-like fiber structure functionalized by magnetic fluid (MF) was proposed. To fabricate the sensor, the single mode fiber (SMF) was bent into a balloon-like structure, and then the shape was fixed by using the alcohol lamp flame. Because of the bending, the fiber core mode leaks into the cladding, thereby forming higher order cladding modes that are sensitive to the variations of external refractive index. When the structure is encapsulated in MF, due to the anisotropic distribution of ferromagnetic nanoparticles under magnetic field, the refractive index around the fiber structure also presents anisotropy. By measuring the refractive index of the MF under different magnetic-field directions and intensities, both the measurement of the magnetic field intensity and direction can be achieved. The experimental results show that a high magnetic field intensity sensitivity of 0.78 nm/mT and a high magnetic-field direction sensitivity of 0.094°/mT were obtained. Due to the simple fabricating method, low cost, and highly sensitivity, the proposed fiber vector magnetometer has potential applications in the navigation, aviation, and electric power industry.

In this paper, a novel optical fiber surface plasmon resonance (SPR) magnetic field sensor is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The structure is fabricated by splicing a section of photonic crystal fiber between two multimode fibers. After the structure is coated with 10 nm Cr and 50 nm Au, the high refractive index (RI) sensitivity, from 1973.72 nm RIU ⁻¹ to 3223.32 nm RIU ⁻¹ in the range of 1.3326–1.3680, verifies the SPR sensor, which is higher than the structure based on single mode fiber with the same coating. In addition, the microscopic mechanism of the tunable characteristics of magnetic fluid RI with the ambient magnetic field is simulated by the molecular dynamics method. To measure the external magnetic field, the sensing region of the SPR sensor is fully inserted in a capillary tube, which is filled with magnetic fluid and sealed with UV glue. A maximum sensitivity of 4.42 nm mT ⁻¹ is achieved in the range of 0–24 mT, experimentally. Due to high sensitivity, simple manufacturing and compact size, the proposed sensor possesses attractive application prospects in environmental monitoring, power transmission and biomedical applications.

A thermal stress range analysis of tungsten-rhenium thin film thermocouples based on ceramic substrates is presented to analyze the falling off and breakage problems caused by the mismatch of the thermal stresses in thin film thermocouples (TFTCs) and substrate, and nano-indentation experiments are done to measure and calculate the film stress to compare with the simulation results. Optimal design and fabrication of tungsten-rhenium TFTCs based on ceramic substrates is reported. Static high temperature tests are carried out, which show the optimization design can effectively reduce the damage caused by the thermal stress mismatch.

Two sandwiched ZnO/Metal/ZnO transparent conductive thin films, 50nm ZnO/Cu/50nm ZnO (abbreviated as ZnO(Cu)) and 50nm ZnO/Ti/Cu/Ti/50nm ZnO (abbreviated as ZnO(Ti/Cu)) were deposited by magnetron sputtering technology. The comparative analysis of experiment results shows that the introduction of the Ti layer is beneficial to the overall properties of ZnO(Ti/Cu) thin film compared to ZnO(Cu) thin film with the same metal layer thickness. The effect of the annealing temperature on the performance of the two film systems was studied. Although the carrier concentration did not always increase with annealing temperature, the sheet resistances did decrease due to the obvious increase of mobility. The transmittance of ZnO(Cu) thin films increases with annealing temperature, while that of ZnO(Ti/Cu) films increases at first and then decreases. The optical band gap of ZnO(Cu) thin films increases with temperature, but is lower than that of ZnO(Ti/Cu) thin films, whose bandgap first increases with temperature and then decreases. The figure of merit of the ZnO(Ti/Cu) film is better than that of ZnO(Cu), which shows that the overall performance of ZnO(Ti/Cu) films is better, and annealing can improve the performance of the film systems.

A combined stress-vibration sensor was developed to measure stress and vibration simultaneously based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) technology. The sensor is composed of two FBGs and a stainless steel plate with a special design. The two FBGs sense vibration and stress and the sensor can realize temperature compensation by itself. The stainless steel plate can significantly increase sensitivity of vibration measurement. Theoretical analysis and Finite Element Method (FEM) were used to analyze the sensor’s working mechanism. As demonstrated with analysis, the obtained sensor has working range of 0–6000 Hz for vibration sensing and 0–100 MPa for stress sensing, respectively. The corresponding sensitivity for vibration is 0.46 pm/g and the resulted stress sensitivity is 5.94 pm/MPa, while the nonlinearity error for vibration and stress measurement is 0.77% and 1.02%, respectively. Compared to general FBGs, the vibration sensitivity of this sensor is 26.2 times higher. Therefore, the developed sensor can be used to concurrently detect vibration and stress. As this sensor has height of 1 mm and weight of 1.15 g, it is beneficial for minimization and integration.