NSF Award
0340172
0340172<br/><br/>This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop novel optical<br/>pressure sensor materials that can be used in low pressure regimes, less than 100 psi, with<br/>1 psi or lower resolution. While conventional "pressure sensitive" materials such as<br/>pressure sensitive paints actually respond to oxygen partial pressure, few true optical<br/>pressure sensors exist that can claim insensitivity to competing effects such as chemicals,<br/>bending, temperature, and electric field. Conventional sensors such as fiber Bragg gratings <br/>and fiber Fabry-Perot interferometers will continue to be prohibitively expensive for volume <br/>applications for a very long time and cannot match the price performance mark of material-<br/>based techniques.<br/><br/>This pressure specification covers a wide range of applications where optical sensors (and<br/>Fiber-optic sensors in particular) are desirable, including diverse markets such as<br/>biomedical and surgical (e.g. intravenous and intra-cranial monitoring), energy (fuel cells<br/>and gas turbines), materials processing (plastics and polymers), and petrochemical<br/>applications (down-hole temperature and pressure monitoring).
