A Plastic Optical Fiber Sensor for Vibration Measurements

An innovative low-cost, intensity-based optical sensing system to measure vibrations is presented. The developed system uses a cheap setup based on plastic optical fibers and non-demanding data processing to measure the amplitude of vibrations, independently from the vibrating surface reflectivity. Moreover the proposed approach is able to operate at much higher frequencies than most of currently available setups. Preliminary measurement campaigns using multicolored vibrating surfaces have been carried-out to assess the performance of the system.