Vibration monitoring based on optical sensing of mechanical nonlinearities in glass suspended waveguides

Vibration monitoring plays a key role in numerous applications, including machinery predictive maintenance, shock detection, space applications, packaging-integrity monitoring and mining. Here, we investigate mechanical nonlinearities inherently present in suspended glass waveguides as a means for optically retrieving key vibration pattern information. The principle is to use optical phase changes in a coherent light signal travelling through the suspended glass waveguide to measure both optical path elongation and stress build-up caused by a given vibration state. Due to the intrinsic non-linear mechanical properties of double-clamped beams, we show that this information not only offers a means for detecting excessive vibrations but also allows for identifying specific vibration patterns, such as positive or negative chirp, without the need for any additional signal processing. In addition, the manufacturing process based on femtosecond laser exposure and chemical etching makes this sensing principle not only simple, compact and robust to harsh environments but also scalable to a broad frequency range.