Sapphire Based Fiber-Optic Sensing for Extreme High Temperatures

Temperature sensing is one of the most common and needed sensing technique, especially in harsh environment like a coal gasifier or an airplane engine. Single crystal sapphire has been studied in the last two decades as a candidate for harsh environment sensing task, due to its excellent mechanical and optical properties under extreme high temperature (over 1000°C).

In this research, a sapphire wafer based Fabry-Perot (FP) interferometer sensor has been proposed, whose functional temperature measurement can go beyond 1600°C. The size of the sensors can be limited to a 2cm-length tube, with 2mm outer diameter, which is suitable for a wide range of harsh environment applications. The sensors have shown linear sensing response during 20~1200°C temperature calibration, with high sensitivity and resolution, and strong robustness, which are ready for the field test in real-world harsh environment.