Protection of public and military personnel from chemical and biological warfare agents is an urgent and growing national security need. Along with this idea, we have developed a novel class of fiber optic chemical sensors, for detection of toxic and biological materials. The design of these fiber optic sensors is based on a cladding modification approach. The original passive cladding of the fiber, in a small section, was removed and the fiber core was coated with a chemical sensitive material. Any change in the optical properties of the modified cladding material, due to the presence of a specific chemical vapor, changes the transmission properties of the fiber and result in modal power redistribution in multimode fibers. Both total intensity and modal power distribution (MPD) measurements were used to detect the output power change through the sensing fibers. The MPD technique measures the power changes in the far field pattern, i.e. spatial intensity modulation in two dimensions. Conducting polymers, such as polyaniline and polypyrrole, have been reported to undergo a reversible change in conductivity upon exposure to chemical vapors. It is found that the conductivity change is accompanied by optical property change in the material. Therefore, polyaniline and polypyrrole were selected as the modified cladding material for the detection of hydrochloride (HCl), ammonia (NH3), hydrazine (H4N2), and dimethyl-methl-phosphonate (DMMP) {a nerve agent, sarin stimulant}, respectively. Several sensors were prepared and successfully tested. The results showed dramatic improvement in the sensor sensitivity, when the MPD method was applied. In this paper, an overview on the developed class of fiber optic sensors is presented and supported with successful achieved results.

The primary objective of this work was to develop and optimize the calibration techniques for ultrasonic hydrophone probes used in acoustic field measurements up to 100 MHz. A dependable, 100 MHz calibration method was necessary to examine the behavior of a sub-millimeter spatial resolution fiber optic (FO) sensor and assess the need for such a sensor as an alternative tool for high frequency characterization of ultrasound fields. Also, it was of interest to investigate the feasibility of using FO probes in high intensity fields such as those employed in HIFU (High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) applications. In addition to the development and validation of a novel, 100 MHz calibration technique the innovative elements of this research include implementation and testing of a prototype FO sensor with an active diameter of about 10 μm that exhibits uniform sensitivity over the considered frequency range and does not require any spatial averaging corrections up to about 75 MHz. The results of the calibration measurements are presented and it is shown that the optimized calibration technique allows the sensitivity of the hydrophone probes to be determined as a virtually continuous function of frequency and is also well suited to verify the uniformity of the FO sensor frequency response. As anticipated, the overall uncertainty of the calibration was dependent on frequency and determined to be about ±12% (±1 dB) up to 40 MHz, ±20% (±1.5 dB) from 40 to 60 MHz and ±25% (±2 dB) from 60 to 100 MHz. The outcome of this research indicates that once fully developed and calibrated, the combined acousto-optic system will constitute a universal reference tool in the wide, 100 MHz bandwidth.

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