Electrical & Computer Engineering, Department of

 

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

3-11-2013

Citation

Optics Express 21:5 (2013), pp. 6109 - 6114

Comments

Copyright © 2013 Optical Society of America. Used by permission.

Abstract

Active ultrasonic testing is widely used for medical diagnosis, material characterization and structural health monitoring. Ultrasonic transducer is a key component in active ultrasonic testing. Due to their many advantages such as small size, light weight, and immunity to electromagnetic interference, fiber-optic ultrasonic transducers are particularly attractive for permanent, embedded applications in active ultrasonic testing for structural health monitoring. However, current fiberoptic transducers only allow effective ultrasound generation at a single location of the fiber end. Here we demonstrate a fiber-optic device that can effectively generate ultrasound at multiple, selected locations along a fiber in a controllable manner based on a smart light tapping scheme that only taps out the light of a particular wavelength for laser-ultrasound generation and allow light of longer wavelengths pass by without loss. Such a scheme may also find applications in remote fiber-optic device tuning and quasidistributed biochemical fiber-optic sensing.

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