Scaling and antenna gain in integrating fiber-optic sensors

Integrating fiber-optic sensors offer the potential to monitor large spatial extents due to their geometric flexibility. To date, this potential has not been widely exploited. By increasing the length of an integrating fiber-optic sensor, its gain and/or gauge length ran be increased. In addition, by configuring the sensor to a spatial distribution of some parameter field of interest, the antenna gain of the sensor will provide selectivity for that particular distribution. This in effect provides a pre-processing capability that can significantly reduce the complexity of the hardware and software used to analyze the detected signal. In this paper, the results of experiments demonstrating these properties of integrating fiber-optic sensors are presented