FIBRE OPTICS FOR SHIPBOARD SENSING AND INFORMATION TRANSFER

Fibre optics has been a rapidly growing field over the past decade. It has been utilised extensively by the telecommunications industry, an application which requires the transmission of large amounts of information at a high data rate. More recently, many firms have initiated development of fibre optic sensors. These are transducers that use purely fibre optic technology for sensing physical parameters such as pressure, temperature and strain. Trends and projections for ships of the future indicate that dramatically increased monitoring and computer control will be necessary for most ship systems. Not only will automation be used for meeting reduced manning requirements, other economic constraints will require extensive machinery monitoring for improved maintenance scheduling. Integrated navigation systems on commercial ships will require high-resolution displays, and rapid data transfer between satellite, radar and bottom-sounding sonar navigation subsystems. These applications will require fibre optics both in data transfer networks and in sensors. This paper is intended to apprise the marine engineering community of the potential benefits which fibre optic networks and sensors bring to shipboard installations. A brief tutorial on fibre optics is given, including a discussion of space, weight and data rate advantages; the various fundamental sensing techniques are explained and examples of prototype and commercially available sensors for potential shipboard use are provided. The report concludes with an example of a commercial ship application and an assessment of the action needed by the ship design community and sensor vendors to reap the performance, safety and economic benefits of this technology.