Advanced fiber-optic acoustic sensors

Abstract

Acoustic sensing is nowadays a very demanding field which plays an important role in modern society, with applications spanning from structural health monitoring to medical imaging. Fiber-optics can bring many advantages to this field, and fiber-optic acoustic sensors show already performance levels capable of competing with the standard sensors based on piezoelectric transducers. This review presents the recent advances in the field of fiber-optic dynamic strain sensing, particularly for acoustic detection. Three dominant technologies are identified — fiber Bragg gratings, interferometric Mach-Zehnder, and Fabry-Pérot configurations — and their recent developments are summarized.