High precision optical fiber bundle displacement sensor

Abstract

A noncontact optical fiber bundle displacement sensor with nanometer resolution and low drift is proposed. The principle of the sensor is based on reflective intensity modulation technique. The optical fiber bundle probe contains one transmitting bundle and two receiving bundles. There are 727 identical glass optical fibers with a diameter of 50μm arranged in a concentric random pattern at the probe end. The diameter of the probe coated with a thin stainless ferrule is as small as 2.5mm. A carrier amplifier system is adopted to reduce dc drift and the interference of ambient stray light. The disturbance caused by fluctuation of light source and variation of target surface reflectivity is eliminated by taking a ratio of two receiving signals. The thermal drifts from two photoelectric signal processing circuits cancel out each other by using elements with identical specifications for both photodetector-amplifier chains. The sensitivity of the sensor is 5.9mV/nm over a linear range of 700-2300μm with a nonlinearity of 1%. The achieved resolution is 1nm/square root Hz; over a dynamic bandwidth of 10KHz and the dynamic range is 286dB. It has been proved that the sensor run sufficiently well when used with nano-technological instruments.