Optical fibre-based environmental sensors utilizing wireless smart grid platform

With the advent and development of smart grid in recent years, traditional power grid is undergoing a profound revolution. By utilizing modern wireless technology and sensor, wireless smart grid (WSG) can effectively solve many hard and haunting issues in traditional grid, such as high maintenance costs, poor scalability, low efficiency and stability. In a WSG, data are collected by sensors at first and then transmitted to base station through wireless network. After receiving those data, corresponding actions are executed by control center. We present the integration of optical fibre-based sensor to WSG platform for real-time environmental monitoring. As a proof-of-concept, an optical fibre sensor for refractive index (RI) sensing of fresh water is adopted. The sensing mechanism relies on the reflectance at the fibre interface, where the intensity of the reflected spectra is registered corresponding to the change of the RI of the ambient environment. A sensitivity of 29.3 dB/RIU is achieved for the fabricated fibre sensor within the RI range of 1.33–1.46, and the acquired data is transmitted through wireless smart meters.