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Area Engineering

Photonic-based sensing systems for environmental monitoring

Reference persons GUIDO PERRONE

Description Environmental monitoring is a very broad term that refers to the tools and techniques designed to observe an environment through the measurement of some characteristic parameters for the purpose of quantifying the impact an activity has on it. This is clearly too broad, so here we restrict our interest to the use of fiber optic sensors and to monitoring of landslides (i.e., vibrations), temperature and water quality.
Fiber Optic Sensors (FOSs) have unique advantages, such as high sensitivity, immunity to electromagnetic interference, small size, light weight, robustness, flexibility, and the ability to provide multiplexed or distributed sensing. Besides, optical fiber can be easily embedded into composite material, with little or any perturbation of the structure, enabling the realization of smart structures. On the other hand, FOSs are typically much more expensive than their electro-mechanical counterparts, especially for the interrogation equipment, and require a higher expertise for handling. This except for the sensors that exploit the change of the light intensity transmitted in the fiber (the so-called “intensiometric sensors”), which require very cheap interrogators, but are much more sensitive to parasitic perturbations occurring along the fiber. Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors are the most widely studied and have the largest market share of the various optical fiber sensor technologies. One of the most striking feature of FOSs is the distributed sensing capability, which is traditionally obtained by multiplexing several point sensors along the same fiber, often FBG sensors. However, since in practice the distance among the sensing points can vary from centimeters to several meters, these configurations should be more precisely called “quasi-distributed sensing system”. Indeed, more recently, new dedicated equipment for assembling truly distributed sensing systems in which the spatial resolution can be as fine as some tens of micrometers have appeared on the market (OFDR, BOTDR, etc.).
If you choose a thesis on this topic you will be part of a group working on the development of new sensors and the related data acquisition and analysis infrastructure. Depending on your interests and the specific moment in which your activity will be carried out, you will have the possibility to contribute to one of the following sub-themes:
i) Performance analysis of distributed sensing systems for environmental monitoring.
ii) Development of fiber-based vibration measurement systems for environmental and infrastructural monitoring.
iii) Development of innovative fiber sensors for water quality monitoring.
iv) Development of a water quality monitoring infrastructure.
v) Development of soil analysis sensors for precision farming.


Deadline 13/10/2022      PROPONI LA TUA CANDIDATURA




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