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[ w ramach 7PR ]
PHOSFOS (Photonic Skins For Optical Sensing) aims at developing a flexible and stretchable foil that integrates optical sensing elements and that if necessary, appropriate and relevant to the application, can include optical and electrical powering as well as onboard signal processing and wireless communications. This skin can be wrapped around, embedded in, attached and anchored to irregularly shaped and/or moving objects or bodies and will allow quasi-distributed sensing of mechanical quantities such as deformation, pressure, stress or strain.
The photonic skins developed in PHOSFOS will find applications in continuously monitoring the integrity and the behaviour of different kinds of structures in e.g. civil engineering (buildings, dams, bridges, roads, tunnels and mines), in aerospace (aircraft wings, helicopter blades) or in energy production (windmill blades) and therefore provide the necessary means for remote early failure, anomaly or danger warning. PHOSFOS will thereby contribute to safety of the public and personnel. The field of healthcare will also benefit from the development of a highly flexible membrane for such applications as the long term monitoring of respiration and cardiac activity, as well as the detection of pressure points under bed-ridden patients. PHOSFOS will therefore also contribute to better healthcare.
The sensing elements in PHOSFOS will rely on special highly birefringent micro-structured optical fibres (MSF) and polymer optical fibres (POF) with fibre Bragg gratings. The silica fibres will be designed to exhibit almost zero temperature sensitivity to cope with the traditional temperature cross-sensitivity issues of conventional fibre sensors. These specialty fibres will be modelled, designed, fabricated and embedded into a flexible sensing skin of compliant polymer materials. POF fibres will be used for their very specific property that their length can be stretched up to 300 % before breaking. The optimal Bragg grating writing technology in these fibres, both silica and POF, will be developed. PHOSFOS will focus on embedding these into the sensing skin and on the optical coupling/interfacing to the peripheral optoelectronics and electronics.
Two SMEs participate in PHOSFOS. For the first SME, active in the field of structural health monitoring, the commercial revenue is forecast to grow steadily from 50 kEURO in the first year of commercialization to 125 kEURO after five years of commercialization. For the second SME, active in the healthcare sector, total income is forecast to be 8 kEURO in the first year of commercialisation rising to 2.1 MEURO after 9 years.
With these expected revenues and by tackling essential issues such as packaging, fully-fledged system integration, optical coupling and interfacing, dependable strain transfer and reliability, PHOSFOS will support wide deployment of optical fibre sensor technologies. This will strengthen the competitiveness of European industry in this field and at the same time ensure job creation in the involved SMEs.
