Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FINESSE (Fibre Nervous Sensing Systems)

Teaser

The objective behind FINESSE (FIbre NErvous Sensing SystEms) is to mimic the nervous system of living bodies by turning man-made and natural structures into objects that are sensitive to external stimuli owing to advanced distributed fibre-optic sensor technology, with the...

Summary

The objective behind FINESSE (FIbre NErvous Sensing SystEms) is to mimic the nervous system of living bodies by turning man-made and natural structures into objects that are sensitive to external stimuli owing to advanced distributed fibre-optic sensor technology, with the objective to either give early warning in case of possible danger or occurrence of damage, or to optimise the operation of the structure to allow for a sustainable use of natural resources and assets. Enabling such functionalities will greatly contribute to realizing a safe, secure and energy efficient Europe, which is an identified societal concern.
To turn this ambitious concept into reality, 26 European universities, research centers and industrial partners have teamed up to set up this Innovative Training Network, with the common objective of educating and training 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in the development of a set of disruptive new optical ‘artificial nervous systems’ and to boost the industrial uptake of these sensors by technology transfer from academic research to the European optical fibre sensor industry.
The partners also engaged in stimulating awareness of this technology to other scientists and a wider public to encourage research in this field, and improve societal acceptance on distributed fibre sensing systems through various training events, opened to other early career researchers, and outreach activities.
The research ambition in FINESSE is to use a radically innovative approach to develop customised sensing systems in combination with dedicated optical fibres leading to optimal measurement solutions instead of relying on existing optical fibres.
To reach this ambitious goal, the research partners have identified two main complementary scientific approaches that will be developed by our ESRs:
· 5 ESRs work on the development and implementation of new interrogation architectures, that will make distributed optical fibre sensors more efficient with improved performance (millimetre scale resolutions over more than 100m, dynamic measurement up to 1 kHz refresh rate, etc.).
· 5 ESRs concentrate on the fabrication of novel optical fibres, sensitive to other parameters than temperature and strain, including pressure, electric field, curvature, gas concentration, etc. that will be used in distributed optical fibre sensing systems.
· The new interrogation architectures and fibres complementarily developed will be “assembled” to create novel distributed optical fibre sensing systems, which will all be implemented and validated with field trials. These tasks are conducted by 4 ESRs, hosted by FINESSE partners all working in different fields with high potential for industrial deployment of distributed optical fibre sensing, ranging from civil and geotechnical engineering to radioactive waste management.
· The FINESSE consortium recognizes a catalyst is needed throughout the project runtime to ensure an efficient and effective technology transfer process of academic research results to the European optical fibre sensor industry, so that 1 ESR studies technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship in photonics from an economist point of view and feeds her results back into the project and to the fellow ESRs.
As a result, the other ESRs will be able to better understand and approach the market for their developed products. This proposed cross-fertilisation will generate a new breed of top scientists, capable of developing new products through research work and equipped with business and entrepreneurship acumen in their domain. This will greatly enhance the future employability of the ESRs and boost the optical fibre sensing market in Europe.

Work performed

During the 1st period of the FINESSE Innovative Training Network (Oct. 2016-Oct.2018), the main achieved results include:

* The equal-opportunity recruitment of all the 15 ESRs during the 1st year of the FINESSE project, securing the smooth flow and coherence of the project.

* The successful organisation of 3 training events on the topic of optical sensors, distributed sensing methods and speciality fibres, opened to external participation.

* The organisation of a special FINESSE workshop with all talks delivered by FINESSE principal investigators during the 26th International Optical Fiber Sensor Conference (OFS26) in Lausanne, Switzerland, September 2018, attracting more than 300 participants. This workshop was dedicated to emerging applications of optical fibre sensors, and difficulties to face when going from the laboratory to the field.

* A successful mid-term meeting, during which progress and the main outcomes were presented and each ESR presented his/her work individually in front of the project officer and the external expert.

* 21 secondments performed by the ESRs over a total length of around 38 months, establishing extremely constructive collaboration, networking, and outputs.

* An important research material and outputs produced by the ESRs, substantiated by many journal articles, international conference proceedings and presentations in national conferences.

* Several proposed and demonstrated novel configurations of optical fibre sensors, some of which represent real breakthroughs in the field, such as pressure sensing, radiation monitoring and deformation tracking.

Final results

\"During the next period of the project, the following targets are expected to be reached:
1. Technically, the critical design parameters of special optical fibres will be defined and fabricated, together with the identification of practical limitations of the interrogation methods in terms of pressure sensitivity, gas sensing, spatial resolution, accuracy and measured range.
2.Training event 4 will be held addressing \"\"photonics in entrepreneurship\"\" and Training event 5 will deal with \"\"Field Application and Standardisation\"\".
3. A closing meeting is going to be organized at the end of the project, to summarize the achievements of individual and communicative efforts from all the researchers and to identify the promising outputs from the network, sketching a track for the follow-ups.
4. All the ESRs are expected to obtain their Ph.D. degrees by the end of the project. Their research, training, networking and collaboration experience surely will give a complete knowledge and broad vision in the whole field of optical fibre sensing technology, from fibre fabrication to the real implementation of optical fibre sensors, with an end note about industrialization. With this new generation of experts, it will greatly accelerate the development of new and innovative optical fibre sensing technologies and their applications to secure a safer and smarter environment, helping the experts to tackle the complexity of structural health monitoring, and making Europe a stronghold in distributed fibre sensing technology.
5. FINESSE success will promote the concept of smart innerved objects for better use of resources, relying on safer and optimised infrastructures.\"

Website & more info

More info: http://itn-finesse.eu/.