Optical Fiber Sensing: Recent Progress and Future Prospects in Multidisciplinary Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Optical fiber sensors are at the cutting edge of modern sensing technologies because of their unique advantages such as immunity to electromagnetic interference, lightweight construction and the ability to perform distributed and remote measurements. These features have paved the way for their current application in a wide range of areas, including environmental monitoring, structural integrity assessment, biomedical diagnostics, industrial automation, smart grids, energy grid resilience and numerical modelling. Evidence of continued innovation in optical fiber sensor technologies, together with advances in materials science, optical communications networks and data analytics, have further expanded the applications of optical fiber sensors and made them more useful.

The aim of this Special Issue, titled “Optical Fiber Sensing: Recent Progress and Future Prospects in Multidisciplinary Applications”, is to focus on the diversity of applications and the high level of development of optical fiber sensor technologies, both in terms of novel progress and real-world application.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Environmental applications such as air quality monitoring, water management and disaster prevention using measurement data from optical fiber sensors;
• Structural health monitoring in critical infrastructure, including buildings, bridges, and oil pipelines with novel optical fiber sensing;
• Distributed optical fiber sensors (for detection of strain; temperature; and acoustic vibrations in multidisciplinary environments);
• Physical sensors, chemical sensors, and biosensors based on integration of optical fibers;
• Industrial process control and automation, ensuring efficiency and safety for the resilience of renewable energy systems using optical fibers as part of innovative applications;
• The integration of optical fiber sensors into advanced data processing techniques, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to enhance detection accuracy and predictive capabilities;
• Mathematical number models for multidisciplinary applications of optical fiber sensor measurement data.

Dr. Enis Cerri
Dr. Francesco Arcadio
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Photonics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.