Review on Developments in Fiber Optical Sensors and Applications

The last couple of decades had witnessed a steep rise in extensive research of optoelectronic and fiber optical communication fields, which resulted in applications focused initially in military, aerospace equipments, and later in health monitoring for medicine, heritage culture and various engineering fields. Health monitoring has attracted the effort of many engineers throughout the world and is fast emerging as a pioneering field. It is helping to improve world economy in two ways; first, directly by providing longevity to all the important structures and secondly, by prevention of untimely failure leading to loss of life and money. This field is very vast, consisting of traditional monitoring methods as well as smart system based methods. The fiber optics belong to finest class of smart materials, there are many types and classifications of fiber optics based on necessity, manufacturer and the end user. This paper, gives a complete over view of fiber sensing systems and their usefulness. In addition, it highlights some of the general fiber optics available in the market with selected examples.