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Optical Sensors for Industrial Applications: 2nd Edition
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Optical Sensors for Industrial Applications: 2nd Edition

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Optical Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 December 2026 | Viewed by 1749

Editor

Dr. Grzegorz Fusiek

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G1 1XW, UK
Interests: photonic sensors; sensor networks; interrogation techniques; distributed sensing; remote monitoring; photonic instrumentation for industrial applications
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past few decades, optical sensors have been effectively used in various industrial applications in the electrical power, oil and gas, nuclear engineering, and civil engineering sectors, among others. They have proven to be valuable tools in physical, chemical, and biomedical applications, offering several advantages over their traditional equivalents, such as light weight, small size, wide bandwidth, high accuracy, electromagnetic interference immunity, galvanic isolation, and multiplexibility. Many optical sensing technologies have advanced to meet industry standards, offering a direct replacement for their conventional counterparts, providing passive measurements over long distances and improving measurement quality, thus overcoming the current technological limitations to ensure safety, reliability, and data security. They have been successfully applied in harsh environments where their traditional equivalents are not suitable due to operational constraints.

This Special Issue aims to present the latest research advances in the field of optical sensors, distributed sensing, and sensor networks and their applications across various industry sectors. It will also focus on new sensor designs, fabrication methods, sensing techniques, and system architectures to achieve improved measurement accuracy, resolution, and unique functionalities. Following the great success of our previous Special Issue, "Optical Sensors for Industrial Applications" (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors/special_issues/962KHEKGJ2), authors are invited to submit both review and original research articles describing recent advances in optical sensors across a broad range of industrial applications.

The topics of interests include but are not limited to the following:

  • Polarimetric, interferometric, and intensity sensors;
  • Fiber Bragg grating sensors;
  • Novel concepts of photonic sensing;
  • Design and development of novel optical sensors;
  • Sensor fabrication and packaging;
  • Sensor interrogation and multiplexing techniques;
  • Sensor networks;
  • Sensor characterization, calibration and performance evaluation;
  • Remote and distributed sensing;
  • Harsh-environment sensing;
  • Optical sensors for industrial applications.

Dr. Grzegorz Fusiek
Guest Editor

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. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2600 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.

Keywords

  • polarimetric, interferometric, and intensity sensors
  • fiber bragg grating sensors
  • novel concepts of photonic sensing
  • design and development of novel optical sensors
  • sensor fabrication and packaging
  • sensor interrogation and multiplexing techniques
  • sensor networks
  • sensor characterization, calibration and performance evaluation
  • remote and distributed sensing
  • harsh-environment sensing
  • optical sensors for industrial applications.

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Related Special Issue

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 4938 KB  
Article
Research on Electro-Acoustic Synergistic Partial Discharge Detection Technology for Cable Terminations
by Cong Chen, Xiaojian Wang, Yanju Li and Qichao Chen
Sensors 2026, 26(11), 3460; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26113460 - 30 May 2026
Viewed by 492
Abstract
To address the limited spatial localization accuracy of partial discharge (PD) in high-voltage cable terminations and the difficulty in accurately determining the trigger time in traditional ultrasonic detection, this paper proposes an electro-acoustic synergistic localization technology based on a high-frequency current transformer (HFCT) [...] Read more.
To address the limited spatial localization accuracy of partial discharge (PD) in high-voltage cable terminations and the difficulty in accurately determining the trigger time in traditional ultrasonic detection, this paper proposes an electro-acoustic synergistic localization technology based on a high-frequency current transformer (HFCT) and a Sagnac optical fiber interferometer. A high-sensitivity Sagnac acoustic sensor based on a 3D-printed photosensitive resin mandrel was developed. Through structural design and 0–50 kHz amplitude–frequency testing, the sensor exhibits a dominant resonant response at 33.2 kHz. This narrow-band, high-sensitivity characteristic effectively enhances the perception capability for weak PD ultrasonic signals. An electro-acoustic synergistic detection system was constructed, in which the high-frequency PD current signal captured by the HFCT was used as the electrical time reference, and a dual-channel Sagnac sensor array was used to extract the arrival times of ultrasonic waves. In a 12 kV laboratory cable-termination PD experiment, the proposed system identified the representative built-in air-gap PD source with an absolute localization error of 5 mm under the tested laboratory configuration. This value should be interpreted as the localization result for the tested representative defect, rather than as a generally validated accuracy specification of the system. This study provides a proof-of-concept laboratory demonstration of an electro-acoustic localization strategy that combines the fast electrical response of HFCT detection with the electromagnetic-interference immunity and acoustic sensitivity of Sagnac fiber-optic sensing. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Optical Sensors for Industrial Applications: 2nd Edition)
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18 pages, 11185 KB  
Article
Comparative Measurement Accuracy Analysis of an Optical Medium Voltage Transducer Pre- and Post-Lightning Impulse Testing
by Grzegorz Fusiek and Pawel Niewczas
Sensors 2026, 26(11), 3297; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26113297 - 22 May 2026
Viewed by 366
Abstract
This paper reports on the performance of an optical voltage transducer (MVT) module after undergoing lightning impulse withstand tests. The device was designed to monitor the output voltage of a dedicated capacitive voltage divider (CVD) to facilitate a voltage sensor dedicated for 132-kV [...] Read more.
This paper reports on the performance of an optical voltage transducer (MVT) module after undergoing lightning impulse withstand tests. The device was designed to monitor the output voltage of a dedicated capacitive voltage divider (CVD) to facilitate a voltage sensor dedicated for 132-kV high voltage (HV) networks. Hard piezoelectric transducer (PZT) and fiber Bragg grating (FBG) technologies were combined in the module to serve as a voltage-to-strain-to-wavelength converter. The FBG peak wavelength shifts were calibrated against the input voltage to provide precise measurements of the network voltage. The module was subjected to lightning impulse withstand tests as per the requirements of the IEC 60044-7 and IEC 60060-1 standards, and the impact of the lightning impulses on the performance of the MVT module was evaluated based on the accuracy tests performed before and after the lightning impulse tests. The experimental results demonstrated that the MVT module successfully withstood the lightning impulse tests without any disruptive discharges or voltage collapses. The performance of the module was not affected by the lightning impulse tests within the practical constraints of the reference measuring equipment: its amplitude and phase errors remained within the original limits of ±0.1% and ±0.1° at 80–120% of the rated voltage, and below ±4% and ±2° at 2% of the rated voltage, respectively. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Optical Sensors for Industrial Applications: 2nd Edition)
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17 pages, 15723 KB  
Article
Acoustic Signal Recognition of Partial Discharge Optical Fiber Sensors Using Time-Frequency Phase Composition
by Xuhui Jin, Pengfei Wang, Pengwei Guo, Xin Liu and Yu Wang
Sensors 2026, 26(10), 3193; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26103193 - 18 May 2026
Viewed by 495
Abstract
A novel method for recognizing acoustic signals of partial discharge optical fiber sensors using the time-frequency phase composition property is proposed in this paper. The method involves obtaining the Wigner–Ville time-frequency distribution for acoustic signals from partial discharge optical fiber sensors through the [...] Read more.
A novel method for recognizing acoustic signals of partial discharge optical fiber sensors using the time-frequency phase composition property is proposed in this paper. The method involves obtaining the Wigner–Ville time-frequency distribution for acoustic signals from partial discharge optical fiber sensors through the Cohen bilinear time-frequency transformation, which provides a high time-frequency resolution. The Wigner–Ville distribution could reflect the insulation defect-related properties in detail, owing to the fact that the intensity distribution in the time domain and energy distribution in the frequency domain is seriously influenced by medium dispersion and acoustic propagation. The time-frequency phase composition property is implemented by combining the Wigner–Ville distributions at different phases in the power cycle, which comprehensively represent the characteristics of the acoustic signals from partial discharge optical fiber sensors. A Vision Transformer with an attention block is introduced to identify the acoustic signals of partial discharge sensors. The attention block ensures that the neural network assigns more weight to the energy concentration areas in the extracted acoustic features. To validate the proposed approach, experiments are conducted to identify the acoustic signals of partial discharge optical fiber sensors. The proposed method achieves an impressive accuracy of 99.56% on three group testing sets. This indicates that the proposed approach is a promising method for identifying acoustic signals of partial discharge sensors to detect various insulation defects using acoustic emission feature analysis. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Optical Sensors for Industrial Applications: 2nd Edition)
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