| The use of optical fiber sensors is increasing widely in civil, industrial, and military applications mainly due to their, (a) miniature size, (b) high sensitivity, (c) immunity from electro-magnetic interference, (d) resistance to harsh environments, (e) remote signal processing ability, and, (f) multiplexing capabilities. Because of these advantages a variety of optical fiber sensing techniques have evolved over the years having potentials for myriad of applications. One very challenging job, for any of these optical fiber sensing techniques, is to implement a stand alone system with the design and development of all the signal processing models along with the necessary hardware, firmware, and software satisfying the real-time signal processing requirements. In this work we first develop the equations for the system model of the wavelength modulated extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric (EFPI) optical fiber sensor, and then design and build all the hardware and software necessary to implement a stand-alone system, satisfying all the requirements of the real-time signal processing capabilities. We also present the real-time system constructions and the signal processing techniques for the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) and the long period grating (LPG) sensors, and develop all the necessary signal processing software for the FBG system. The Texas Instruments TMS32OC40 floating point digital signal processing (DSP) chip is used as the mother processor for the system. All the hardware and software necessary to interface the stand alone system to the Internet is also designed and developed, and one can establish a client/server environment using the TCP/IP protocol suite to acquire data, and/or monitor or control the system, using computers having Internet IP addresses assigned to them. |
