PHOSFOS

PhoSFOS is a research and technology development project co-funded by the European Commission.

The PHOSFOS (Photonic Skins For Optical Sensing) project is developing flexible and stretchable foils or skins that integrate optical sensing elements with optical and electrical devices as well as onboard signal processing and wireless communications, as seen in Figure 1. This flexible skins can be wrapped around, embedded in, attached and anchored to irregularly shaped and/or moving objects or bodies and will allow quasi-distributed sensing of mechanical quantities such as deformation, pressure, stress or strain. This approach potentially gives a significant advantage over conventional sensing systems because of the portability of the resulting systems and the extended measurement range.

The sensing technology is based around sensing elements called Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs) that are fabricated in standard single core silica fibers, highly birefringent Microstructured fibers (MSF) and Plastic optical fibers (POF). The silica MSFs are designed to exhibit almost zero temperature sensitivity to cope with the traditional temperature cross-sensitivity issues of conventional fiber sensors. These specialty fibers are being modeled, designed, fabricated within the programme. FBGs written in POF fibers will also be used since these fibers can be stretched up to 300% before breaking. This allows them to be used under conditions that would normally result in catastrophic failure of other types of strain sensors.

Once optimized the sensors are embedded into the sensing skin and on the interfaced to the peripheral optoelectronics and electronics. These skins are really flexible, see Figure 2.

The photonic skins developed in PHOSFOS have potential applications in continuously monitoring the integrity and the behavior of different kinds of structures in e.g. civil engineering (buildings, dams, bridges, roads, tunnels and mines), in aerospace (aircraft wings, helicopter blades) or in energy production (windmill blades) and therefore provide the necessary means for remote early failure, anomaly or danger warning. Applications in healthcare are also being investigated.

There is a movie describing the technology on YouTube.

A summary of the key developments can be found on the PhoSFOS EU webpage [1] and include the demonstration of a fully flexible opto-electronic foil.

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