Liquid-level sensing based on a hollow core Bragg fiber

A novel optical fiber liquid level sensor based on a hollow core Bragg fiber (HCBF) was proposed and demonstrated. The HCBF was first designed and successfully fabricated with periodic transmission band in the spectrum and a transmission loss of similar to 3.48 dB/cm. An inline optical fiber liquid-level sensor was fabricated by simply sandwiching a piece of HCBF between two single mode fibers. The sensing performance was experimentally tested. A linear liquid-level sensitivity of similar to 1.1 dB/mm, and fast response time less than 3s was obtained by the intensity demodulation measurement. The temperature and refractive index cross-sensitivities were also investigated. The experimental results indicate that our proposed structure has tiny temperature and RI dependence, which makes it a promising liquid level sensing platform for different liquids. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement