Design and development of an electromechanical test bench for the study of optic sensors

The goal of this thesis is to test a new typology of fiber optic sensor: the Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG). The work has been achieved at the Aerospace Engineering Department of the Politecnico of Torino, in collaboration with the interdepartmental team Photonext and the Istituto Superiore Mario Boella. During the discussion it is possible to see what the FBG and their prop-erties are, what their big advantages would be and also their disadvantages. The tools and the hardware that have been designed to test the FBG and the software used to process the output data will be listed. This work is justified by the enormous advantages of the FBG used like sensors. They are lightweight and, since they work with light, they are indifferent to electromagnetic interferences. Furthermore, an optical fiber could have more Bragg Gratings inside itself, so it could make different measurements in different points, also of different physical phenomenas. Hence, with only one optical fiber, temperatures, pressions, strains and vibrations could be detected, which brings great benefits to redundant the sensors of any engineering system. Lastly the FBG in itself does not need external power source, unlike to common electric sensors.